GOSFORD PARK
Year: 2001
USA: USA Films
UK: Entertainment Film Distributors
Cast: Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ryan Phillippe, Tom Hollander, Jeremy Northam, Helen Mirren, Charles Dance, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith, Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant, Alan Bates, Kelly Macdonald, Emily Watson, Clive Owen, Claudie Blakley, James Wilby, Camilla Rutherford, Geraldine Somerville, Sophie Thompson, Natasha Wightman, Bob Balaban, Eileen Atkins
Director: Robert Altman
Countries: UK / USA / Germany
USA: 137 mins
UK: 136 mins
USA Rated: R for some language and brief sexuality
UK Certificate: 15 contains strong language and one moderate sex scene
USA Release Date: 4 January 2002 (Limited Release)
USA Release Date: 26 December 2001 (Limited Release - Los Angeles and New York)
UK Release Date: 1 February 2002
Synopsis
Robert Altman, one of America's most distinctive filmmakers, journeys to England for the first time to create a unique film mosaic with an outstanding ensemble cast. It is November, 1932. Gosford Park is the magnificent country estate to which Sir William McCordle and his wife, Lady Sylvia, gather relations and friends for a shooting party. They have invited an eclectic group including a countess, a World War I hero, the British matinee idol Ivor Novello, and an American film producer who makes Charlie Chan movies. As the guests assemble in the gilded drawing rooms above, their personal maids and valets swell the ranks of the house servants in the teeming kitchens and corridors below-stairs. But all is not as it seems: neither amongst the bejewelled guests lunching and dining at their considerable leisure, nor in the attic bedrooms and stark work stations where the servants labor for the comfort of their employers. Part comedy of manners and part mystery, the film is finally a moving portrait of events that bridge generations, class, sex, tragic personal history - and culminate in a murder. (Or is it two murders...?) Ultimately revealing the intricate relations of the above and below-stairs worlds with great clarity, the film illuminates a society and way of life quickly coming to an end.
