In the Flesh: Gosford Park

It’s difficult to square the Julian Fellowes who wrote Downton Abbey with the Julian Fellowes who wrote Gosford Park a decade and change earlier. The latter has every last tooth, claw, and brutal instinct lacking from the sloppily sentimental former. Perhaps it’s the involvement of director Robert Altman and producer/actor Bob Balaban that sets Gosford so far afield from Fellowes’ usual rose-tinted view of life in the great English manor houses of the twentieth century. Perhaps Fellowes’ sensibilities have merely stiffened and regressed with age. Whatever the truth, Gosford Park is an absolute motherfucker of a black comedy, opening with a maid standing in the rain to make sure her patroness doesn’t have to close her own car door and ending with two aging women sobbing in each other’s arms over everything the aristocracy has taken from them. Little by little, inch by inch, the ghouls upstairs pick over the men and women who serve them until nothing remains but gristle and bone.

Shot with a deft yet meticulous touch by Altman and equipped with a murderer’s row of great English, Scotch, and Irish talent, Gosford Park doesn’t so much peel back the airy veneer of English high society as it does ignore its existence altogether. The film plunges at full speed into the rancid dysfunction of the noble McCordle family, a clan of dullards, dupes, rapists, and grasping opportunists all swarming around the leering Churchillian wreck that is the family’s patriarch, sir William (Michael Gambon), and the equally dysfunctional lives of their varyingly loyal, resentful, and outright mutinous servants. Fellowes’ script is witheringly caustic, and Maggie Smith without the demands of gold-hearted likeability imposed by serialized television is a creature of pure venom, flatly reptilian to the point of sociopathy. The scene in which she breaks down laughing after an actor has hot coffee dumped in his lap by a vengeful servant is one of the film’s most delightful, as genuine as it is unsettling. The McCordles seem to find happiness only in the misfortune of others, be it stranger or family member.

Wickedly barbed as the film is, it would be nothing without the grounding presence of Kelly McDonald as Mary Maceachran, lady’s maid to Smith’s Countess Trentham. McDonald, then a relative newcomer, slips effortlessly into the company of some of England’s finest actors, holding her own with a hidden steeliness behind her seeming naivete. Her chemistry with Clive Owen’s Robert Parks is electrifying, and in her single scene of consequence with Helen Mirren’s Mrs. Wilson there is an incredible tension between the two women, a sense that someone or something must surely snap. Mirren herself is astounding, a woman made solely of poise and heartbreak. Not quite Agatha Christie parlor murder mystery, not quite The Damned with its hideous story of aristocratic industrialists, Gosford Park is something all its own, a nightmarish comedy of manners skewering the emptiness and vapid stupidity of the all-encompassing English upper crust and their Byzantine, self-immiserating ways of wasting the fortune they raped the whole planet to get.