Gosford Park Trivia

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GOSFORD PARK TRIVIA IMMERSIVE  TASTING

If you’ve read any of the reviews of « Gosford Park, »

you know already that the praises being sung for Robert Altman’s latest film have generally resolved into a single chorus:

Beyond the brilliant ensemble performances and the uncharacteristically restrained camerawork, the real achievement of the film is the revival of that most tired and unfashionable of narrative genres

the English manor-house whodunit. And at first glance, it does seem like a remarkable feat, particularly given Altman’s track record at reviving defunct pulp entertainment. (A certain spinach-eating cartoon sailor springs to mind.)

The manor-house whodunit — after a brief flowering in the late 19th century and a long middle age of mediocrity sustained largely by Agatha Christie and her disciples

now survives mostly in the degraded form of Lifetime channel reruns of « Murder, She Wrote. » Breathing new life into this form is like resuscitating Professor Plum after he’s already been stabbed in the drawing room.

And yet somehow Altman pulls it off. But not just by collaborating on a deft and genuinely touching script, or assembling a cast of Britain’s finest not-quite-marquee actors (along with the sublime American actor Bob Balaban, who co-conceived the film). Altman doesn’t just revive an untimely genre by propping it up with smart writing and smart actors: He performs a more impressive sleight of hand, which is to take a tired genre and reconnect it to its roots — like a kind of stop-motion film of literary history run in reverse. You can think of it as an Agatha Christie movie that slowly transforms itself into a 19th-century triple-decker novel as you watch it.

Which is intriguing enough, but it’s even more so if you keep in mind that the Christie genre descends from that more highbrow literary tradition, although the lineage is often obscured. It’s like taking a wayward bastard son and reuniting him with his noble, if somewhat calcified, true father. Which, as it turns out, is one way of describing the plot of « Gosford Park. »