ANew Era is Downton’s solid victory lap
Downton Abbey: A New Era Directed by Simon Curtis Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★ 1⁄
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Julian Fellowes is fond of a classical allusion. Towards the end of Downton Abbey: A New Era, the screenwriter even manages to wedge a great slab of King Lear into the perma-scowl of Carson the butler, as played by the terrific Jim Carter, who – oh, that’s right – once appeared in an adaptation of Lear with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
It’s just the sort of gag that Fellowes is prone to – in-jokey, one for the luvvies, but also wellwritten and perfectly delivered.
Which kind of sums up Downton Abbey for me, with its soft-pedalled determination to not let anything – the Titanic disaster, the Great War, the Spanish Flu, or a working class uprising – disrupt its central tenet: that as long as the toffs are benevolent, foreigners are gently mocked and everyone knows their place, then the sun will still come up in the morning.
The year is 1928. We know this because Fellowes, in an even more egregious example of referencedropping, manages to include the information that Abel Gance’s Napoleon had been in cinemas the year before.
We learn this via an ambitious film-maker, who is asking to use the titular pile as a location for his latest project.
Filming will involve a crew taking over the house, movie stars moving in and the downstairs staff collectively swooning that such grandeur and proximity to fame should be coming to stay so near their ’umble abodes.
Luckily for half the cast, the news has also arrived that the Countess (Maggie Smith, still the collapsing star around which the entire Downton galaxy revolves) has been left a villa on the French south coast – and that the Earl (Hugh Bonneville) and immediate family must immediately high-tail it to the Cote d’Azur to inspect the house and to find out exactly why a French nobleman who knew the Countess for only aweek, 64 years ago, should have left her such a grand bequest. Could there be something about the Earl’s paternity that the old Countess has been keeping to herself all of these years?
Downton Abbey: A New Era plays like two pretty decent storylines from the show, welded together.
The film-making shenanigans at the house allow the cast and writers to have all sorts of japes sending themselves and the industry up something rotten.
A side-plot on how ‘‘the talkies’’ ended the careers of somany silentera actors and directors is, admittedly, pretty well done. And the possibility of a great lost love for the Countess allows Smith a few lines and moments worthy of the swan-song this film represents.
And make no mistake – unless some bloody fool decides to launch a prequel series – this film is definitely here to put a bow on the entire franchise.
We never say die – especially not with the sort of box-office these films can still command – but by the end of A New Era, there are not many loose ends left toweave a new narrative from.
All the familiar faces are wheeled out for their moment in the sun. Guest players DominicWest and Laura Haddock are the visiting ‘‘stars’’ and the fabulous Nathalie Baye (CallMy Agent) gives as good as she gets as the Countess’ very French counterpart and rival en amour.
Downton Abbey: A New Era is exactly the warmhearted, daft and tirelessly eager-to-please film it needed to be. As a victory lap for a slender idea that didn’t drop the ball across six series and two films, it seems well-deserved.