Altman’s latest no walk in the park

Geoff Carter

Friday, Jan. 11, 2002 | 9:24 a.m.

"Gosford Park" is a misfortune, a plodding and incoherent work from the Robert Altman who brought you "OC and Stiggs" and "Popeye," as opposed to the Altman who made "Nashville" and "The Player." He coasts on the sumptuous photography of Andrew Dunn, terrific production design by his son Stephen Altman, and the expectably reliable performances of his cast, which more or less amounts to the Merchant-Ivory Variety Pack.

But Altman fails them all, and at such a level it's almost difficult to forgive him. For a man who's more or less helped define the notion of an actor's director, Altman makes such a rough road of "Gosford" that the actors seem to be at war with it. A few overcome the film's glacial pacing and paper-thin plot, but for everyone else it's a fight: The Battle of Gosford Park, fought with dry English humor and the all-too-occasional lethal weapon.

Succinctly put, it's upstairs versus downstairs. A group of characters come to the estate of the title for a weekend of game hunting and fraternizing; they're the upstairs crew. Downstairs is the more interesting group: their servants and the house staff, a gossiping yet inherently proud group. They spend most of the film trying to stay out of the other group's way, until a murder -- very late in the film -- forces their collision.

The bluebloods have their agitators, chief among them Constance, Countess of Trentham, played with wicked wit by Maggie Smith. Dame Maggie loathes her counterparts as much as their servants do, and doesn't hesitate to peg them. She asks a producer of Charlie Chan mysteries (Bob Balaban, who conceived the film with Altman) the identity of the killer in his next film: "None of us will see it."

It's a brave line, because by the time "Gosford Park's" murder occurs, none of us care. It's purely an afterthought, the only way the film could think to bring its classes into conflict. There were other, interesting avenues the script and Altman could have explored: Lady Sylvia, the lady of the manor, dallies with a servant (Ryan Philippe) who is hiding something. The servant Parks (Clive Owen) has a penetrating stare that seems a story in itself, and his interest in Constance's maid (Kelly MacDonald) would have been fascinating had it been explored.

But "Gosford Park," like its upper-crust characters, expects its audience to wait upon it. For its first hour, the characters do little but mutter and mingle in that Altman idiom that was so riveting in "The Player," except that film had a hidden corpse from its first half-hour. Everything that film's characters said and did had real gravity because a man had already died for it. The stakes in "Gosford" are established too late for anyone to feel them.

Many of the upstairs group have little or nothing to do.

And the downstairs crew, with a few notable exceptions, are trying to stay out of the way -- which is doubtlessly the way Altman wanted it. ("I'm a perfect servant. I have no life," a character says near the end -- and although she's a well-known actress, it's the first time she's really registered with the viewer. It's a nice twist, but it's not enough to redeem the film.)

"Gosford Park" is being hailed as a late career high-water mark for Altman, and perhaps it is -- any time a director can put a film over purely on his formidable track record, it's a notable event. It's a perfect crime: Who would suspect one of America's best directors of committing this crime? Too bad OC, Stiggs and Popeye weren't available for questioning.