Gosford Park

Watched Gosford Park recently, it had been on my list for a long time. Robert Altman's 2001 film is built like an Agatha Christie whodunit but refuses to behave like one as it starts rolling. The murder gets solved, technically, but Julian Fellowes described it as a "who-cares-whodunit" which is exactly right.

Sir William McCordle is found stabbed at his desk and few people in the house, upstairs or down, are particularly distressed. His wife Sylvia cannot summon up any expression suitable for a woman freshly widowed. His servants, many of them women he employed in his factories and then took advantage of, are obviouly not overcome with grief. The weekend shooting party wants to get on with their lives and over this mild inconvenience. McCordle's monstrousness is not a class-specific grievance. He has wronged the people who work for him, but he has also treated his wife as a financial arrangement, bought his way into an aristocracy that privately finds him grotesque, and held his relatives in a grip of dependency that everyone finds humiliating but no one has escaped. The people who dislike him above stairs dislike him for different reasons than the people below, but the dislike runs equally deep.

The detective, Inspector Thompson played by Stephen Fry, is full of bluster and is tremendously useless. He dismisses the servants as suspects because they don't have, in his phrase, "a real connection" to the victim which is class instinct operating as professional judgment. He can't imagine the murder came from below stairs, so it didn't, as far as his investigation is concerned. The film lets him reach the wrong conclusion by a route that is internally consistent with how he sees the world.

Nobody in the house tries very hard to help the hapless detective reach a better outcome because they are all hoping that he does not get it right. Snobbery operates in every direction here: the servants protect their own not out of solidarity but out of a shared understanding that McCordle got more or less what was coming, and that the rules of justice which exist to protect people like him don't require their cooperation or participation. The aristocrats above stairs are too refined to want the mess of a real investigation. Everyone has a reason to let the thing go quiet.

The twist is that McCordle had already been poisoned before he was stabbed, meaning there were two separate killers acting independently. His death required two people, from two different circumstances of injury, acting without knowledge of each other and that is not coincidence. That is a man who had made enough enemies, thoroughly enough, that justice arrived twice over. He had way too many enemies so just about any two of them could have gotten together to kill him. The detective and everyone else involved does not think it worth purusing who those two might have been. The man was greatly disliked, got poisoned and stabbed. No biggie.