Gosford Park – 2002 | 137 mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Robert Altman, one of America’s most distinctive and famous ensemble filmmakers, journeys to England for the first time to create the follow-up to Dr. T and the Women. Altman’s unique mosaic whodunit set during a weekend party at a country house is a cross between Upstairs Downstairs and an Agatha Christie mystery. The snobbery and eccentricity of the British class system is characterised by fine performances from an illustrious British cast with Kelly MacDonald and Clive Owen shining.

It is November, 1932. Gosford Park is the magnificent country estate to which the philandering Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), gather relations and friends for a shooting party. They have invited an eclectic group including a killjoy countess (Maggie Smith), a World War I hero, the British matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) and a gay Hollywood film producer Morris Weisman (Bob Balaban), who has brought along his valet Henry Denton (Ryan Phillippe). As the guests assemble in the gilded drawing rooms above, their personal maids and valets swell the ranks of the house servants in the teeming kitchens and corridors below-stairs.

But all is not as it seems: neither amongst the bejewelled guests lunching and dining at their considerable leisure, nor in the attic bedrooms and stark work stations where the servants labour for the comfort of their employers. Part comedy of manners part and part mystery, the film is finally a moving portrait of events that bridge generations, class, sex, tragic personal history and culminate in a murder. (Or is it two murders?) Ultimately revealing the intricate relations of the above and below-stairs worlds with great clarity, Gosford Park illuminates a society, a way of life, swiftly coming to an end.