Loads of top-notch British actors inhabit Gosford Park, some of them as lords and ladies, some as servants. Maggie Smith tosses off deliciously vicious barbs upstairs; Richard E. Grant does the same downstairs. Jeremy Northam is the darkly handsome, smolderingly sexy idol for the upper class; Clive Owen takes the role amongst the serving class (and golly, are they good at it! Especially Owen... shouldn't servants have their shirts off more often?). There are lots of jokes about how common actors are, and how deplorable movie-making is, which gets too precious after the fifth or sixth time (we get it -- these are actors making fun of themselves! Ha ha! How scintillatingly clever. Let's move on now).
Frankly, I'm not on the Altman bandwagon. Most of his movies put me to sleep. He has no focus, and he's self-indulgent -- his movies are way too long, and there are too many characters. His best movie is The Player, which, not coincidentally, is primarily about one man -- though lots of other characters appear, they're part of Tim Robbins' story. Following various characters' threads is wonderful if you do it well, but I just don't think Altman does.
I'm not sure if it was an attempt to give the movie some weight, but there's a tiresome subplot about an orphan. From the moment Owen's valet announces he's an orphan, you just know we're going to be treated to the shocking discovery of who his parents are, which even the dullard audience with which I saw the movie figured out way ahead of time, because nobody gasped when his parental secrets were revealed (they did, however, gasp when Kristin Scott Thomas put on a fox stole -- oh no, not fur! -- which caused a guy behind me as we were leaving the theater to say to his friend, "I thought the movie was a dreadful bore, and so was the audience," which was pretty funny, but not nearly as good as the story my friend Amy told me about when she saw the movie and had a talker behind her: a valet tells the cook that his boss is a vegetarian, a term with which the cook is unfamiliar, so the valet explains, "He doesn't eat meat. He eats fish, but not meat," and the woman behind Amy said, "But fish is meat!").
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