hi


Two New Films Take A Look At How
A Life Of Privelege Can Fuck You UP
by: Steve Ellman

All in the family
Wes Anderson may be just beginning a directing career that will prove as long and fruitful as Altman's, but he's already a hot enough commodity that Hollywood's leading lights jump at the chance to work with him. Those who made the cut for "The Royal Tenenbaums"-including Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene Hackman, Angelica Houston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson-are an A-list of properties that any director could take to the bank. But Anderson gets lost in the film's embarrassment of riches,
 
which includes, beyond the movie's cast, the quirky cool of the director's own fertile imagination.

Anderson made his bones on his first two films, 1996's "Bottle Rocket," and 1998's "Rushmore," both of which showed his knack for getting inside the heads of slightly cracked young men with warped, if harmless, ambition-the nobility of solipsism, if you will.

But the self-obsessed interior life doesn't carry well to the new film's broader canvas-a family drama/comedy-as the director tries to do too much, stuffing every last possible bit of cleverness into the film's 103 minutes. Every character is eccentric, every corner of every scene has its shtick-that's Chekhov in the hands of Margot Tenenbaum (Paltrow) as a little girl-every taxi in the film's imagined New York is "Gypsy Cab Company." It's an overly eager production, as if Anderson expects every film to be his last.


closermagazine
A less charitable interpretation would be that Anderson, like his characters, is so entranced by the workings of his own imagination that he's lost perspective. A little less cuteness would be in order. No wonder Royal Tenenbaum (Hackman) the family's black sheep patriarch, emblematic of an unfettered lust for life, can't help but feel cramped. He's an emotional bull in a neurotic china shop.

There's an oddly recycled feeling to the movie as well. Many critics have noted the story's resemblance to J.D. Salinger's Glass family cycle-a clan of precocious New Yorkers done in by their own wealth of talent. Even the film's soundtrack, by former DEVO Mark Mothersbaugh, undeniably hip and tasteful as it is, draws on film scores past--a couple of Bob Dylan numbers from Sam Peckinpah's 1973 "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." It's a minor point, but it stuck with me: When have you ever heard one film's music used in another except as some kind of plot device?

Altman in Wonderland
Since his 1992 triumph, "The Player," director Robert Altman has had an uneven time of it. While the critical and box office success of that spot-on look at contemporary Hollywood would have been a career boost for some, uh, players, "The Player" turned out to be a poison pen farewell note. One could just about hear Altman choking on the bile behind every one of the film's funny, knowing observations on the workings of Hollywood, and his work since then has suffered from show biz fatigue.

Altman drifted, turning out ambitious, flawed efforts like 1993's "Short Cuts" and trivia like 1994's "Ready-to-Wear" and 1999's "Cookie's Fortune." His most recent effort, 2000's "Dr.T and the Women," was doomed from the start, starring as it did Richard Gere, who-good Buddhist though he may be-can't act much.

Now, however, at age 76, Altman has bestirred himself, like a shaggy old bear done hibernating for the winter. Reinvigorated, interested in movies again, and armed with a brilliantly-honed script by Julian Fellowes, Altman, maker of classics like "Nashville," "M*A*S*H," and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" has turned his hand to that well-worn genre of moviemaking-the English country house murder mystery.

The result-"Gosford Park"-is a physically gorgeous, emotionally generous picture of life and love in England between the two world wars. It's a film that's precise to its time and place-cloche hats, tweed, and all the alabaster bric-a-brac of the period fill the frame--but the lovingly detailed costumes and sets are just ornament to human conditions that are, for better and for worse, universal.

Altman's never been more subversive, addressing the issue of class in a way rare in American film. As the well-heeled guests at Gosford Park gather for a weekend shooting party, it's clear they live in a land that forgot time, or tries to: As in some of the more rarefied reaches of Palm Beach, the clock here has stopped at the height of the Victorian Age, the white man's luxurious burden resting squarely on the shoulders of a small battalion of butlers, footmen, gamekeepers and maids.

Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue and restless camera follow the waited-on upstairs as they indulge themselves in social, financial, and sexual intrigues and on the working class below in strivings and passions of their own. A cast that's a virtual who's who of England's acting profession serves up a bubbling profusion of well rounded, deeply felt portraits. Kristen Scott Thomas, as the weekend's lascivious hostess, Lady Sylvia McCordle, is positively succulent, cherry-picking sexual favors among the servants. Alan Bates, as head butler Jennings, and Helen Mirren, as chief housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, offer wonderful studies in embattled pride and resignation to the narrow, self-denying demands of the servant's profession. Dame Maggie Smith's Countess of Trentham is delicious, an acid-tongued gossip-monger who can't get enough of the worst in everyone and the best in personal accommodations. To see her clamoring for breakfast in bed or resting with a fox wrap over her shoulders and a cucumber slice on each eye is a distillation of comically self-righteous entitlement.

Along with the explorations of class and character, the film could almost be a guidebook to the proper functioning of a country manor. Altman lays bare the volume and rigor of physical labor that lets the rich live so differently than you and I. Half the squires couldn't tie their own shoelaces if their lives depended on it. If the strange interdependency of the two classes leads the servants to mimic the status anxiety of their masters-the seating order at the servant's meals is precisely defined-it's still the case that no man is a hero to his valet, and the small talk downstairs reveals how clearly the servants see through the posing of their masters.

The whodunit of this mystery story takes up so little of the film's running time it almost seems an afterthought. The lord of the manor, the aging, insufferably self-absorbed Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), is discovered after dinner with a sizable kitchen knife deep in his back, and the search for his killer reinforces how bonded every class is in the weaknesses of the flesh-and who pays the price. Well before that, however, "Gosford Park" has made it clear just how much life "in service" is life painfully denied.