CLASS ACTION : Altman's 'Gosford Park'.

Robert Altman seems an unlikely director for Gosford Park. How could the sensibility behind a film as sprawling and wild as Nashville possibly cram itself into the small-genre box of a period-piece murder mystery set on an English country manor in 1932? Isn't that too tame, too mannered, too British? The whole thing seems way wrong, until you see the movie, which is way right.

Altman is arguably the American director of our time. With their ensemble dramas, interconnecting plots, and trademark overlapping dialogue, his best movies--M*A*S*H*, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, The Player, Nashville--present a brand of cinematic art keyed perfectly to the raucous free-for-all of American society, to what poet Delmore Schwartz once called "the scrimmage of appetite all around." No one else gets the allure, the excess, the danger, and the energy of this country like Altman; no one loves us and loathes us as well. With his signature mix of the hilarious and the ferocious, the seventy-six-year-old director has kept a steady bead on the wildly moving target of American life.

Life at Gosford Park, on the other hand, seems at first glance hardly to move at all. The setup is pure Agatha Christie, which is to say, Jane Austen plus a murder. A dozen guests gather at the country home of Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) for a weekend of dining, cigars, entertainments, and a pheasant shoot. The film is mostly talk; eavesdropping, we learn who is beholden to whom, who covets what, who has a secret assignation where. There are motives aplenty for murder. There are bottles of poison in the kitchen. There's even a butler, Jennings (Alan Bates)--though it seems unlikely that he did it.

Where the violence of American society sits right on the surface, in 1930s England it's all buried, embedded deep in the tissue of class, and you can feel Altman's glee in wielding the knife. Power in America is a grab; at Gosford Park, it's a given. Those who have it, use it, with condescension and casual disdain for those on the receiving end. Class means knowing--and accepting--your place, even if your place is standing in a downpour outside a parked car, like the servant Mary (Kelly Macdonald), helping milady (Maggie Smith), sitting snug and dry inside, open a martini shaker. Class means knowing who's invisible. When the lone outsider at the party, an American movie producer (Bob Balaban) introduces himself to Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance) with a nasal "Hello, I'm Morris Weissman," the debonair lord, majestically baffled, answers, "Who?" How could he possibly be engaged in conversation with someone named Morris Weissman? It's as if a fly has spoken.

Most invisible of all are the servants. The credits at film's end divides the cast into "Above the Stairs" and "Below the Stairs," and Gosford Park's main business is exploring the insults and intrigues of class. Altman and his screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, portray the insolent freeness with which the bluebloods talk in front of the servants, and the arrogant arbitrariness of power, as when Smith's Countess Trentham commands Mary to wash a shirt for her in the middle of the night--then decides, come next morning, not to wear it after all. A servant's life consists of a thousand such cuts. Yet what bubbles away below the stairs is hardly revolution. The head housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), briskly summons other servants by their masters' names, and seats them at the kitchen dinner table according to their masters' eminence. The head butler, Jennings, fidgets uncomfortably when Weissman calls him "Mr. Jennings." American-style egalitarianism can only spoil the party at Gosford Park; it throws sand in the gears of the social machine.

And the upstairs-downstairs relation proves far more flexible and complex than it seems. The lords and ladies provide an ongoing soap opera for the servants, who are alternately peeved and awed; there's a great scene in which the entire staff stands outside the drawing room door, swooning, while one handsome houseguest, the noted actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), sings at the piano. And the aristocrats in turn continually press their servants for the latest gossip below. Altman anatomizes hierarchical social relations, where seemingly rigid boundaries sponsor a permanent culture of transgression, small and large--from Jennings surreptitiously licking his finger after pouring Bloody Marys, to Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) indulging a coldly businesslike tryst with a handsome young servant. Sexual liaisons across class lines are a fact of life, especially with the notoriously lecherous Sir William around. The only sin is indiscretion. Or--worse--love.

Eventually, when a murder occurs, it's almost as an afterthought. Gosford Park isn't really a whodunit, but a study in manners and morals. The real violence inheres in the very structure of society, and in personalities--the murderousness of sharks like the Countess of Trentham, whose every utterance is at some deep level an assault. ("Difficult color, that green," she says, eyeing another woman's dress. "Very tricky.") The murder itself, which appropriately combines poisoning and stabbing, is merely an expression of the prevailing social Darwinism. These people have motives, but don't really need them; they are their own motives.

Altman's view of human nature has been called pessimistic, even misanthropic, but that's misleading. He's too interested in people, too exhilarated by the sheer craziness of their brazen assertions of self. (Remember Henry Gibson's character in Nashville?) No misanthrope could be as fascinated by misanthropy as Altman is. Perhaps the most chilling moment in Gosford Park occurs when a servant "accidentally" spills hot tea on the lap of a guest who has slighted him, and Maggie Smith's Countess of Trentham, sitting nearby, chortles in quiet spasms of mirth, betraying her deep pleasure in malice. "How do you put up with these people?" the outsider, Weissman, asks the piano-playing actor, Novello. "You forget," he answers. "I earn my living by impersonating them." So too with Altman. It's the magic trick all artists pull off, and satirists especially. Their characters' depravity becomes our delight.

Finally, Altman is a genius at scale. No other director has so sure a grasp of both micro and macro, the private and the public. For all the contemporary feel of his films, he's really a nineteenth-century novelist among directors: He gets the individual, and he gets society. (His overlapping dialogue, for instance, merges private tete-a-tetes into the collective social babble.) A lesser director would have focused Gosford Park--would have chosen Mary or some other servant as a point-of-view character, then given us her struggle against inequity. Altman gets that struggle, but doesn't limit himself to it. He's not interested in just the end effects of class, but in the ordering mechanism itself: he wants to depict class in action, as it were. It's this dynamism that gives his films their particular quality of constant motion; that makes them so--well, dynamic.

Gosford Park has its faults. A bumbling inspector, played by Steven Fry, intrudes a note of silly farce; the cast is so large that keeping track of secondary characters proves arduous; the tying-up of plot strands comes across as both perfunctory and far-fetched. But these are quibbles. The movie is a gem in a less-than-sparkling season, and if Altman doesn't pick up a Best Director Oscar--he has already won both the New York Film Critics Circle and Golden Globe awards--then something is wrong in Hollywood.

But, of course, something is wrong in Hollywood. Gosford Park serves up a murder, but it's really about the death throes of an entire order: pre-WWII, English, country, aristocratic. Significantly, the outsider, Weissman, is a Jewish Hollywood producer of Charlie Chan movies who intends to set his next movie on an English estate; we understand that he represents the future, and it's going to be the American future, the Hollywood future. And no one knows better than Altman what that means for art--remember those writers in The Player pitching their movies to studio execs? ("It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman....It's Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate.") The new American dispensation will be meritocratic, yes, but vulgar, a culture of mass entertainment. And so, come Oscar time, Gosford Park will prove itself right by not winning. Nice trick.