Gosford Park

I've stated before that I can't really afford all the premium movie channels, so I only get to watch them during the various free preview weekends that DirecTV (and I'm assuming other cable and satellite operators) have, and DVR a whole bunch of movies during those times. Several months back, I recorded Gosford Park, and only now finally got around to watching it.

The movie starts off with a title pointing out that it's November 1932, and with a couple of people getting into a car on a very rainy Friday. Those people are Countess Trentham (Maggie Smith) and her servant Mary MacEachran (Kelly Macdonald) along with their driver. They're going to one of those weekend-long parties held by the upper class in those days that you've probably seen in movies of the pre-Code era; this particular party is being hosted by Sylvia McCordle (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her husband Sir William (Michael Gambon), the Countess being Sylvia's aunt.

There are a bunch of other people coming, including Sylvia's sisters and their husbands; British actor and singer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) together with Hollywood producer Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban); and a guy who's fallen on hard times, Freddie Nesbitt along with his wife Mabel, Freddie being there hoping to consummate a business deal with Sir William.

Most of the invited guests have brought servants of their own, who are to work with the McCordles' staff, which is headed by butler Jennings (Alan Bates), cook Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins), and Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren). Among the servants brought by the guests are Weissman's strange Scotsman Henry (Ryan Phillippe), who may or may not be an imposter; and Robert Parks (Clive Owen), in service to Sylvia's sister Louisa and her husband.

During the first evening there, it turns out that any number of people have good reason to dislike Sir William. There's the usual family tensions, such as him possibly cutting off an allowance to Trentham; the business dealings with Nesbitt; or resentments among the various sisters. Weissman is probably the one person who doesn't care, as he's constantly trying to place phone calls to Hollywood to deal with the new England-set Charlie Chan movie he's trying to get funded.

More interestingly, the downstairs servants have their own set of problems to deal with. Sir William became wealthy from having owned several factories. But rumor has it that he would sleep with the female workers, and when one of them would get "in trouble" (of course a euphemism for being pregnant), Sir William would take the resulting children to an orphanage and sack the workers in question. Nobody would question him, since who would believe this about an upstanding member of the aristocracy, especially if he's only being questioned by a manual laborer.

We see the resentments at the hunting party, as somebody nearly shoots Sir William in the ear, but it's only after dinner on the second night that we see somebody go into the room where Sir William is cleaning his gun that a presumably male figure stabs him and he dies. The police come to investigate, in the form of Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry), who may not be competent enough to solve the case.

There's a lot going on in Gosford Park, and depending on your perspective that may or may not be to the movie's benefit. I personally found it complex and requiring very close watching. If you get up to go to the bathroom or get refreshments without pausing, you're going to miss a lot; even if you do pause, you may have to stop and consider what's been going on before restarting.

The movie also has a rather languorous pace, running a little over 130 minutes before the closing credits come on; the murder doesn't occur until about 80 minutes in, something rather different from a lot of murder mysteries. But then Gosford Park isn't really about the murder mystery, instead being about the relationships between the various characters, which do mostly come together at the end.

Those issues having been dealt with, the positive is the acting, which is mostly quite good, and the attention to detail, which I'm sure would look nice on a pristine print on Blu-ray with a good TV. I'm watching on an older TV and I'm not certain how much compression DirecTV uses, but this was one of the movies that made me wonder whether something was up with the print.