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"Where am I going to be ten years from now?" Robert Altman wondered in 1992, even as The Player was restoring his reputation as America's greatest working filmmaker. "I'm going to be 77. That's pretty old. So what have I got? Six, seven pictures left. And unless I feel that I will have fun with the shooting of a film, and can smile afterward and say, We did a good job on that, then I don't want to do it."
Altman is now 76 and has already completed seven more features. Of these, Short Cuts (93) built on his rejuvenation, Pret-d-Porter (94) marred it, while Kansas City (96), The Gingerbread Man (98), Cookie Fortune (99), and Dr. T. & the Women (00) showed only flashes of his old brilliance and bile. Any suggestion that Altman has wound down, however, is happily refuted by his latest, Gosford Park, a multi-character comedy of bad manners that has the confidence to fold a third-- act deconstruction of the country-house whodunit into its sardonic analysis of the British class war.
Gosford is an eavesdropper's paradise, with its prowling camera peering-from behind foliage, through fronds and lattices-at privileged employers and put-upon servants over the course of a weekend in November 1932; it even picks out stray...