Gosford Park (an analysis)
Minutes of character development and exposition: 135
Minutes of plot: 5 (the last five)
Despite those 135 delightful minutes in the life of an English country house and its 162 inhabitants (both above- and below-stairs), I have only the barest grasp on who all those characters were, much less their names. Not exactly a home run for Robert Altman.
I have that problem with every Altman film I’ve seen. It’s like walking down a busy street and trying to piece a story together from the conversations you overhear.
THANK you. I wanted so much to like it, but I could not get past the unnecessary (and entirely superficial) complexity.
I’m bewildered that no one else seems to mind how trivial the whole thing is.
Trivial is a good word, Mike. Tepid is another.
Oooh, I disagree. I loved it. I didn’t care about the murder mystery. In fact, about halfway through the movie I said to the person next to me – it’s a murder mystery but we don’t really care who did it. I cared a lot more about just immersing myself in the banter, in the atmosphere, in the awefulness of the upper class to their servants, in the pacing of each scene, in the sheer complexity of everything going on. The larger stories (long-lost family members blah blah blah) were much more important than who killed whom anyway. It worked for me.
What art said. Yeah.