Review: Gosford Park
Just saw Gosford Park. Good movie, but it had what seemed to me to be one big flaw, until I watched the making-of stuff on the DVD. I was going to mark this as a spoiler, but I think it's actually something good to know going into it (but if you really don't want to know anything about the movie going into it, don't read the rest of this entry):
Although the advertising bills this as a mystery, I found the plot insufficiently twisty. I thought the movie dropped too many clues and the herrings were insufficiently red. But it turns out that the plot twists weren't really the point; Altman was going for a different kind of story than what you'd expect if you're told it's a mystery.
So this becomes yet another movie where my thinking I know something about it ahead of time (even just from reading what's written on the box) significantly reduces my enjoyment of it, because it shapes my expectations. Sigh.
I should note, though, that I also did something most viewers probably wouldn't, and that it may've drastically changed my experience of the movie: about 20 minutes into it, I rewound to the point where most of the characters are introduced, and brought up the IMDB, and figured out what names belonged to which faces, going through the introduction scenes one at a time and making sure I knew more or less who was who. I did this because at 20 minutes into the movie we had approximately 35 named characters and I couldn't tell many of them apart. I know that's part of what Altman does well; I suspect if I hadn't taken this approach, by the end of the movie I would have pretty much sorted out who was who. (That happened for me with both Short Cuts and (more or less) Prêt-à-Porter, and probably with The Player, though my memory of that is a bit hazy.) But then I'd have to watch it again to get full benefit from it, and for once I wanted to know who was who in an Altman film all the way through. So it's possible that the things that I thought were over-obvious clues were actually necessary for viewers who didn't have the benefit of the detailed introductions to the characters that I gave myself.
Other than that: the actors are uniformly good (I particularly like Emily Watson as Elsie, and Kelly Macdonald as Mary Maceachran), the script is good, the movie is nicely done. I can't talk about the things that I think are coolest without really big spoilers, but I will note that I like the whole upstairs/downstairs thing, and I like the fact that they hired people who'd actually been servants in 1932 (when the movie is set) as technical advisors.
Best part of the making-of documentary was Altman talking about the fact that he doesn't really learn scripts; he assumes the actors know their lines, and then he has the script supervisor keep an eye on things. He said:
We do a scene, I say "That's terrific!" and I'll turn to the script supervisor and I'll say "Did we get all the plot points in?" And she'd say, "Well, no, they left out the thing about the murder." I'd say "Oh shit, well, ah, we gotta do that again, and who's supposed to mention the murder?" 'Cause I don't know.
. . . I like seeing all the extra material on DVDs, but it sure does add a lot of time to the amount of time it takes to watch a movie.