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‘Downton Abbey’ Review: Back to the Past

From its spectacularly detailed aesthetic to the characters’ march down well-worn personality paths, the movie argues insistently for the status quo.

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‘Downton Abbey’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director michael engler narrates a sequence from the film..

“I’m Michael Engler, and I directed ‘Downton Abbey.’ At this point in the movie, the king and queen and their retinue have arrived, and they’re staying at Downton. And this is the big banquet dinner that they’re all going to be at together. And the servants at Downton have found out that they won’t be actually serving the king and queen, and the royal staff is going to be serving. And so there’s been this conspiracy to replace them and to restore the glory of Downton by having the staff serve and make dinner for the king and queen.” “Tom, you’re looking pleased with yourself.” “He was just praising Lady Bagshaw’s maid.” “There’s always a certain amount of tension between individual agendas and behavior and then what is expected of one and of the group.” “This is good. I thought something else was planned. But it is excellent. So a well done too old Courbet.” “This wasn’t Monsieur Courbet, Your Majesty. Mrs. Patmore cooked it. In fact, it is the Downton Abbey staff who are serving you this evening.” “That sets it up so that the contrast of when Molesley, who was supposed to be seen and not heard, he speaks up, and all eyes are on him. You know, I wanted these very long, formal, static shots of—” “I do beg your pardon, Your Majesty.” “The people at the table looking at him, try to include as many people as possible so you could see how big a room had been quieted by this and was focused and stilled. But also we played around with, well what shall we do with the score, here? What should it feel like and all that. And then in the end we played the absolute silence except for the light ticking of the clock. Kevin Doyle who plays Molesley is a brilliant actor. And because he is so real and he can play the most dramatic moments, but he is also fearless comically and really, really funny.” “I suppose he’s excited that they’ve had to take over from our people. I wonder what’s happened.” “Whatever may have happened does not excuse his behavior.” “I can assure you, Lady Grantham, we are quite used to people behaving strangely when we are near.” [LAUGHTER]

By Jeannette Catsoulis

“Just like the old days,” Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) says, fondly, as “Downton Abbey” gathers all the familiar faces in bustling preparation for an imminent royal visit. Viewers who have faithfully followed the genteel tribulations of the Crawley clan for six seasons of glittering television will need no encouragement from me to re-immerse themselves in the show’s warm bath of privilege. Those who prefer their ablutions minus the scum of entitlement can safely give this big-screen special a miss.

The old days, of course (the “good” is silent), are what the Downton universe is selling, a magnificently appointed fantasy of benign aristocracy, grateful underlings and noblesse oblige. Picking up in 1927 shortly after the TV show’s finale, the movie finds the household frantically readying for a lavish dinner, a fancy parade and a grand ball in honor of King George V and Queen Mary. Amid the hubbub, Lady Cora dispenses her usual calming looks and soothing advice, still oblivious to her husband’s seeming preference for the company of his dog. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) continues to fret, but not too much, over the estate’s financial problems. And Violet, the Dowager Countess (the indispensable Maggie Smith) — always the lemon in the soufflé — is scheming to secure a family inheritance.

Below stairs, the Royals’ stuck-up retinue is attempting to supplant the Downton domestics. Daisy (Sophie McShera), the tart kitchen maid, is making eyes at a saucy plumber, and a butler emergency coaxes Carson (Jim Carter), that reliably priggish defender of probity, out of retirement. There’s some petty pilfering, a blink-and-you-miss-it assassination attempt and a bit of bother with a boiler. But it’s all weak tea, with the occasional decorous tilt toward politics (of the Irish-Republican kind) and scandal (of the butler-on-the-down-low kind). This last leads us to a clandestine gay club where a rowdy group of men are deliriously dancing the Black Bottom . It’s easily the movie’s liveliest scene, and the most surprising, not least because the north of England in the 1920s was hardly a gay haven.

With barely enough plot to go around, most characters are served a tiny dollop. Lacking the nutritious story lines of the past, the cross-cultural liaisons and the odd inconvenient corpse in Lady Mary’s bedroom, the movie is mainly empty calories. Yet its screenwriter, Julian Fellowes (who created the TV series), knows his stories have always relied less on words than on the looks — arch and knowing, suspicious and appalled — that ricocheted around every social gathering. Choreographing those is the job of the director, Michael Engler, who stretches each raised eyebrow and pursed lip to big-screen proportions, miraculously without turning every close-up into a cartoon.

From its spectacularly detailed aesthetic to the characters’ march down well-worn personality paths, “Downton Abbey” argues insistently for the status quo. Lady Mary fleetingly questions the future of the aristocracy, only to be reassured — by a servant, mind you — that she and her ilk are not just relevant, but essential. And when the 1926 General Strike is mentioned, it’s solely to allow Violet to quip that her maid was “rather curt” with her at the time. Supporting a class system as rigid as Violet’s spine, the Downton staff are so devoted to their betters that even when they stage a revolution, its purpose is to deny themselves a night off.

You have to admire Fellowes’s ability to turn the sour sauce of oppression and inequality into comfort food. So when Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) finally sails in, mere minutes before the end credits, to waltz with Lady Mary and assure her that Downton will endure forever, the faithful will likely feel as relieved as she does.

Downton Abbey

Rated PG for men kissing and women keeping secrets. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.

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Downton Abbey Cordially Invites You to Fall in Love With It Again

Downton Abbey , the movie version, is a very good season premiere and season finale of Downton Abbey rolled into one, multiplex-accessible-only, two-hour package. If this sounds like an insult it’s not meant to be. The ideal case scenario for this addendum to the enormously popular period piece, which ended its six-season stateside run on PBS in 2016, is a supersized episode of Downton Abbey that is enjoyable and substantial enough to justify its existence. The film, written by series creator Julian Fellowes and directed by Michael Engler, who directed multiple episodes of the TV original, is exactly that.

If you were a regular Downton Abbey viewer, you’ll likely feel satisfied by this motion picture experience, which brings back nearly all of the show’s key characters, bumps up the production value a few notches for the big screen, and structures its one-off story around a special visit from King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James). If you weren’t a regular Downton Abbey viewer, honestly, I can’t imagine you’re going to go see this movie.

The filmmakers can’t imagine it either, which is why Downtown resumes its British aristocratic action in the fall of 1927, just shy of two years after the events of the series finale, and makes no attempt to provide exposition or background to anyone who may be unfamiliar with the members of the Crawley family or the staff who serves them. It’s a smart, efficient move, and appropriate for a work so fixated on politeness and protocol. Downton Abbey assumes you already know the rules of this society and therefore doesn’t need to bother explaining them.

The movie opens with the arrival of a fateful letter from Buckingham Palace announcing that the royals will visit Downton, an occasion that will involve a parade and a dinner. (When you’re the King and Queen of England, I guess it’s completely fine to invite yourself over to other people’s houses?) This news causes much excitement and stress among the downstairs staff, all of whom must determine how to feed and attend to the monarchs. That includes good ‘ol Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), still in charge of the kitchen and working alongside the pleasantly contrary Daisy (Sophie McShera); ultra-practical head housekeeper Mrs. Carson (Phyllis Logan), formerly known as Mrs. Hughes; and Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), who has taken over as butler in the wake of Carson’s retirement. In a way, Thomas has also retired in that he’s (mostly) stopped being an asshole.

Of course when Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) perceives that Thomas may be slightly jittery about the high-stakes royal social call, she goes to see Carson and pulls him out of retirement to temporarily take over butler duties. (Remember how Carson retired because he was suffering from palsy? Literally no one mentions that this happened or that it could be an issue if he returns to work.) But any bad feelings between Carson and Thomas are immediately overshadowed by the conflict between the royal staff, overseen by a snobby and rude head butler, or Page of the Backstairs as he prefers to be called, played by David Haig. When the Downton regulars are told that their services won’t be needed once the servants of the king and queen are on the premises, a tug-of-war for power — power, in this case, being the permission to carry trays of food to the uppermost members of Britain’s privileged class — ensues.

But there’s more, and by more, I mean all of the things you’ve been conditioned to expect from Downton Abbey : close-ups of wine being poured through cloths; Carson saying things like, “There must be no tomfoolery” and “This is most inappropriate”; concerns (still!) about whether Tom Branson (Allen Leech), former Irish revolutionary and loyal member of the Crawley family, will be able to control his political impulses; close-ups of clocks being wound; Thomas wrestling with his homosexuality; a subplot about items that have gone missing from the Downton household; conversations about whether a traditional estate like Downton can still exist in a changing England; concerns about an inheritance (Imelda Staunton plays Lady Maud Bagshaw, a cousin of Hugh Bonneville’s Lord Robert Grantham who is his closest blood relation but does not plan to make him her heir); and an overenthusiastic Molesley (Kevin Doyle), who rejoins the Downton staff to help with royal preparations, completely mucking up in the most embarrassing way possible. Oh, and yes, before you ask: Dame Maggie Smith is very present as the Dowager Countess, who is not happy about that whole inheritance situation involving her son and plans to make an issue of it. Also, yes, she and her bestie Isobel (Penelope Wilton) are still constantly snipping at each other and, yes again, Granny still is not shy about sharing her opinions. (“Machiavelli is underrated,” she says at one point. She does not seem to be joking.)

Story-wise, Downton Abbey reinvents no wheels, but that’s just fine. There is a comfort and a pleasure in simply being with these characters again and marinating in their lives, where everything seems very high-stakes but, for the most part, isn’t really. Plus, everything looks even more beautiful than it did on television. There are more wide shots of autumnal leaves falling on the lush green of the Crawleys’ estate and extra magic in the magic-hour shots captured beautifully by cinematographer Ben Smitherd. Even the costumes, designed by Anna Robbins, who made the clothes such a signature of the series, pop off the screen with more texture and beading that sparkles a bit more brightly.

Because the cast is so large and there is a fair amount of story to cover, Downton Abbey bounces around quite quickly from moment to moment, giving some characters shorter shrift than others (sorry, fans of Mr. Bates) and dropping some pretty major plotlines, including an assassination attempt, rather swiftly to move on to other things. But the show always operated this way, too, and regulars will reacclimate pretty quickly to its rhythms. There are a couple of bombshells — one minor, one major — that get dropped that make it clear that Fellowes is still genuinely interested in creating new stories about these beloved characters as opposed to purely going for a recent-TV nostalgia play. There’s a scene between Smith and Dockery late in the film, in particular, that aims straight at the tear ducts and hits a bull’s eye.

Downton Abbey , the series, has only been gone for a little more than three years. But that’s just enough time to make its return very welcome, and to make this feel like the right moment to usher it back into the zeitgeist again. How nice to spend a couple of hours in a world where manners matter and the nastiest word anyone says is “bloody.” How lovely to immerse oneself in an England where Boris Johnson is not an authority figure and where the crassest American is Elizabeth McGovern in a tiara. How pleasurable to once again escape to this thoroughly ridiculous, richly rendered place and live there, if only for a couple of hours until the credits roll.

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Film Review: ‘Downton Abbey’

Years after the serialized drama whose story it continues left the air, “Downton Abbey” is doubly nostalgic.

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

Chief TV Critic

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This new feature film about the lives of a family scrapping to preserve their fortune, and those of the servants attending them, is explicitly designed as a balm for the aching hearts of those who loved watching the TV version. (Stateside, that program aired as part of PBS’s “Masterpiece” franchise from 2011 to 2016.) And, just like that series, the “Downton” film looks back even further than the early-to-mid-2010s, recalling a time of innocence and of understated glamour. That the film opens with the revelation that King George V and Queen Mary are to visit the estate and tracks the visit to its conclusion provides, among other things, an opportunity for the cast to dress in decadent, richly jewel-toned formalwear.

Not that they need a reason. The Crawley family, inhabitants of the massive estate that gives the film its name, dress for dinner nightly. But a big, multistage party in honor of the royals gives “ Downton Abbey ” something at its center with high enough stakes and the requisite amount of retro luxury. It also provides an opportunity for writer Julian Fellowes to stage the conversation he seemed, throughout the series’s run, to prefer having, an emphasis on the value of tradition that comes on so strong as to arrive at a stifling sort of social conservatism. “Downton Abbey” has always been, above all, about the value of preserving tradition; stripping away its muscularly written soap plotlines in favor of a thin picaresque tale of a royal visit reveals just how much of the show’s appeal is ideological.

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After all, the story here is so slight that even several characters seem not to notice it’s happening. The Crawleys’ reaction to the royal visit is a certain arch bemusement; Mary (Michelle Dockery) seems put out that she’ll have to organize tasks for the servants to do in order to prepare. (As a character, Mary remains the show’s single most original, subversive idea: A sympathetic protagonist who’s less an antiheroine than an unapologetic brat.) She is eventually witness to an attempted act of grave violence and then moves on, as does the movie; she has a momentary crisis and decides she should sell the house, but is convinced by her maid (Joanne Froggatt) that the house is too important for the people who work there — not merely as a place of employment but as the center of their emotional lives. Mary moves on.

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Similarly blithe-spirited are the lord and lady of the house (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), who make expressions of vague concern while remaining basically assured that the situation will sort itself out. And the Dowager Countess ( Maggie Smith ), more than ever a one-liner machine deployed to pick up the energy level regardless of whether her utterances track with the situation, is consumed by a feud with the Queen’s lady-in-waiting (Imelda Staunton), who just happens to be a Crawley cousin. The family is as benignly far from dazzled by the power of the throne as the servant class is in awe of it, and the below-stairs plotlines through the film tend to focus on how unfair it is that the servants are to be deprived the opportunity to wait on royalty (the King and Queen, you see, travel with their own cooks and footmen).

This injustice finds itself resolved through a heist-like scheme that feels strangely unworthy of a franchise whose past deviations from credibility tended to move in the direction of soapy dramatics and not loopy comedy. But it is, at least, a throughline. Juggling many characters, all of whom have been through many years of melodrama, director Michael Engler — who previously helmed episodes of the series — won’t or can’t invest real time into any one. As such, we glide over the surface of, say, Edith (Laura Carmichael), who on television had been a slow-burning surprise, the unlucky Crawley sister who discovered independence before love. Here, her storyline is that she has a disagreement with her husband that they work to figure out. The servants almost to a one share the story of trying to meet the queen; an exception is the ever-thwarted gay servant Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), who gets a romance that’s both warming and so unstintingly syrupy a plotline for one of the show’s most cynical characters that it’s hard to take seriously.

As a series, “Downton Abbey” sprawled, giving viewers the drama and chaos they wanted before a season-ending resolution of conflicts. Here, there’s only time for the resolutions, even before the drama happens. So much of this film’s diffuse plot works this way, explicitly granting characters whatever had been their wish with only the most perfunctory of obstacles in their paths, that the greatest impression is left by the battle that’s hardest-won, on the part of the servants to help the royals. The undistinguished direction has the ironic effect of bringing the royals down to earth — little about their visit seems special or unique — but the script pushes back, hard.

The inhabitants of Downton Abbey have no real take on the monarchy other than that it is exciting and fun, just as they tend to think of their employers in glowingly positive terms. The Crawley’s Irish son-in-law (Allen Leech), a former family employee who believes in the Republican cause, remains silent on the matter out of respect for the family, while a ditzy scullery maid (Sophie McShera) makes anti-monarchist noises before abandoning the cause, as if to prove the case that dubiousness about the nation’s unelected ruling class, rather than dignified silence, is strictly for dilletantes. For their parts, the King and Queen are pleasantly empty, with the dramatic heavy lifting going to their daughter Princess Mary (Kate Phillips), who at one point tells her parents that she values the crown more than her own happiness. The dutifulness, from those who putatively serve the nation and those who literally serve them, is so thick in the air that it grows hard to make out a single free-willed character — which stops the drama dead in its tracks.

“Downton Abbey” makes an interesting comparison piece not merely with its source TV show — which, though every bit as uncritical in its depiction of a historical moment, was vastly richer on a character and plot level and a bit less conservatively shot, too — but with “Gosford Park.” That 2001 film was also written by Fellowes, the Cambridge-educated son of a diplomat, but, whether thanks to the input of director Robert Altman or Fellowes’s ability to surf the tides of culture as it changed, was vastly more ironic and cynical about the vapidity of the elite.

In both films, Maggie Smith plays a basically idle woman dependent on inheritances and allowances to stay afloat; in only one of them is her situation portrayed as outright heroic rather than somewhat pathetic, and is she given an eleventh-hour speech to the effect that cultural evolution is to be expected, but family continuity remains an important core value. Elsewhere in “Downton Abbey,” her feud with her cousin reaches rancorous heights due to that cousin’s decision to leave her fortune to her maid rather than her distant Crawley relations. The question of why the Crawleys would be entitled to an estranged relative’s money rather than lucky and grateful to get it is evidently beneath the film.

A film based on a show as beloved as “Downton Abbey” would have to do a lot wrong to alienate its core fans. While this attempt cannot juggle all its characters and isn’t nimble enough to find a new way to make its story work, this feature does not err quite that much. It’s reminiscent in this way of the 2008 film “Sex and the City,” which was strangely, lumpily paced and told a basically unnecessary story, but which was still true enough to its characters that it was embraced by fans. Those who love the Crawleys will find things to love here, from Mary’s insouciance, unchanged by the years, to the pleasant coziness of moments in the village surrounding Downton Abbey. But for some viewers who watched the show with an increasing sense of its fundamental coolness towards the idea of progress, its creepy-Crawley sense that to hope for or work for a more equitable world was not to know one’s role, this journey to the past may end up feeling ultimately less nostalgic than backward-looking.

Reviewed at Digital Arts Screening Room, New York, Aug. 28, 2019. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 122 MIN.

Production: A Focus Features release and presentation, in association with Perfect World pictures of a Carnival Films production. Producers: Gareth Neame, Julian Fellowes, Liz Trubridge. Executive producers: Nigel Marchant, Brian Percival. Co-producer: Mark Hubbard.
Crew: Director: Michael Engler. Screenplay: Julian Fellowes, based on the television series created by Julian Fellowes and produced by Carnival Films. Camera (color): Ben Smithard. Editor: Mark Day. Music: John Lunn.
With: Hugh Bonneville, Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Maggie Smith, Imelda Staunton, Penelope Wilton, Laura Carmichael, Joanne Froggatt.