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Robert Altman doesn't just enliven the corpse of the manor-house murder mystery -- he reunites it with its vital literary forebears.
Jan 24, 2002 | If you've read any of the reviews of "Gosford Park," you know already that the praises being sung for Robert Altman's latest film have generally resolved into a single chorus: Beyond the brilliant ensemble performances and the uncharacteristically restrained camerawork, the real achievement of the film is the revival of that most tired and unfashionable of narrative genres -- the English manor-house whodunit. And at first glance, it does seem like a remarkable feat, particularly given Altman's track record at reviving defunct pulp entertainment. (A certain spinach-eating cartoon sailor springs to mind.)
The manor-house whodunit -- after a brief flowering in the late 19th century and a long middle age of mediocrity sustained largely by Agatha Christie and her disciples -- now survives mostly in the degraded form of Lifetime channel reruns of "Murder, She Wrote." Breathing new life into this form is like resuscitating Professor Plum after he's already been stabbed in the drawing room.
And yet somehow Altman pulls it off. But not just by collaborating on a deft and genuinely touching script, or assembling a cast of Britain's finest not-quite-marquee actors (along with the sublime American actor Bob Balaban, who co-conceived the film). Altman doesn't just revive an untimely genre by propping it up with smart writing and smart actors: He performs a more impressive sleight of hand, which is to take a tired genre and reconnect it to its roots -- like a kind of stop-motion film of literary history run in reverse. You can think of it as an Agatha Christie movie that slowly transforms itself into a 19th-century triple-decker novel as you watch it. Which is intriguing enough, but it's even more so if you keep in mind that the Christie genre descends from that more highbrow literary tradition, although the lineage is often obscured. It's like taking a wayward bastard son and reuniting him with his noble, if somewhat calcified, true father. Which, as it turns out, is one way of describing the plot of "Gosford Park."
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Successful genres have a way of transforming the physical spaces they occupy, turning them into backdrops for a predictable set of actions. (Think what the "Godfather" films and their ilk did for Little Italy.) Walk through the ornate living spaces of a British country estate, and the mind naturally conjures up images of Hercule Poirot grilling the squire over a glass of claret.
One of the many things to be said in favor of "Gosford Park" is that Altman openly embraces these archetypes, and refrains from the more obvious tactic of archly deconstructing them: We have an honest-to-god stabbing in the library, and an honest-to-god lineup of the assembled suspects in the drawing room, each of whom is interrogated by a pipe-smoking inspector. You don't get the sense that Altman is orchestrating these arrangements in order to laugh at them, as easy as that laughter might be. (He does toss off a few obligatory jokes courtesy of Balaban, who plays a Hollywood exec scouting the location for a "Charlie Chan Goes to London" flick.) "Gosford Park" is a funny movie, to be sure, but it takes itself seriously.
Taking the clichés seriously turns out to be the first step to understanding their origins. We've seen so many manor-house whodunits that the mind naturally starts looking for arsenic bottles and sinister butlers when confronted with a British country home; but when you think about it, the connection is a strangely arbitrary one. How did murder become so intimately tied to the iconography of British upper-class country living? The answer is a kind of detective story in itself, and to tell it you have to go back several generations, to the first great blossoming of the manor house narrative, in Jane Austen's novels of the early 19th century. The estates in Austen's books are invariably as vividly rendered as the characters themselves -- Pemberley, Mansfield Park, Hartfield -- and they are far more than mere backdrops. Austen's plots orbit around their manor houses the way a heist movie orbits around a bank vault. The plots begin because something is unsettled in the stable system of the manor house -- Sir Bertram's departure from Mansfield Park; unmarried Emma living with her father in Hartfield -- and they can't resolve themselves until the estate has been literally settled, until Darcy and Elizabeth retire to Pemberley.
The emphasis on the manor homes can make Austen's novels seem suffocating and excessively delicate to us now, but there is a historical reason for the primacy of the great estates in Austen's work: The world of agrarian capitalism revolved around the large landowners and the "culture of improvement" they espoused, a value system that helped justify their newly enclosed and privatized land by making it more efficient. (There are few more sympathetic figures in the Austen canon than the gentleman farmer, industrious and versed in the latest agricultural techniques.) As Raymond Williams observed in his masterpiece, "The Country and the City," while it is certainly true that Austen's novels represented only a small fraction of the "real, material" conditions of British life in the early 1800s, she was nonetheless measuring the most profound geopolitical tremor at that moment in British history. And the great estates lay at its epicenter.
As it happened, the physical layout of the manor house proved singularly hospitable to elaborate plots, with its mix of public and private encounters, its shooting parties and rotating guests, its upstairs/downstairs mix of social classes. Stories naturally flourished there, and so the setting persisted through the 19th century, even as it became less and less relevant to Britain's increasingly industrial and urban social reality. The manor house continued on as an important setting in the Brontës, in Thackeray, in Trollope and George Eliot. (Less so in Dickens, the most metropolitan of the 19th century British novelists.) By Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" and "Felix Holt," it is showing its age: All the interesting things in the society are happening elsewhere. And even a novel like "Middlemarch" that studiously avoids the great beasts of London and Manchester has to leave the estate grounds to connect to the larger world. (When Dorothea marries Casaubon and retires to his home, the narrative almost lurches to a halt -- Casaubon has to die for things to start up again.)
And so the cast of characters widens beyond the short list of those invited up to the manor, and the manor consequently loses its centrality. You can think of Austen's novels as estate narratives that occasionally pay a visit to the town. The defining unit of "Middlemarch," on the other hand, is the town; the estates live on, but at the margins now.
