Stately return for old favourites
Downton Abbey: A New Era (PG, 125 mins) Verdict: Old era regurgitated ★★★✩✩
LORD and Lady Carnarvon sat just in front of me at Monday night’s world premiere of Downton Abbey: A New Era.
They are the owners of the real-life Downton, Highclere Castle in Hampshire, and I fancy I saw them shifting a little in their seats when Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) was persuaded by Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to allow filming in the great house, on the basis that it would pay for some of the repairs. As in art, so in life. Maybe the storyline was their idea.
This film is the second bigscreen spin-off after 2019’s Downton Abbey and, for all the talk of a new era, writer Julian Fellowes carefully evokes the old era, with the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) firing acid barbs through pursed lips, which is easier said than done. The ‘new era’ bit concerns the arrival of the movies. It is 1928 and a dishy director, Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy), wants to hire the stately pile to make a silent film.
Lord Grantham more or less declares that such commercial vulgarity will happen only over his dead body and, among the more ruthless of us at Monday’s glitzy world premiere in London, this kindled the fleeting hope that his lordship might be about to expire in spectacular fashion, perhaps of an overdose of kedgeree. Downton has always done death rather well.
But no. A hefty cheque helps to change his mind, along with bossy Lady Mary, who realises the film money might ‘bring the house up to snuff’.
Below stairs, dopey Daisy (Sophie McShera) is quivering with excitement at the prospect of seeing matinee idol Guy Dexter (Dominic West) and screen siren Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock, having more fun than anyone) up close. As always with Downton, the suspicion mounts that Fellowes has found out from Wikipedia what was happening at the time and shaped his narrative accordingly.
So, with the South of France becoming increasingly popular with the British aristocracy in the late 1920s, off we duly pop to the Riviera, where old Lady G has controversially been left a handsome villa by a Frenchman with whom she enjoyed an idyllic week back in 1864.
But really it is back at Downton where the more entertaining stuff is going on. The silent film is in trouble, you see, because the talkies have just arrived.
All this unfolds in amiable Downton style, ably directed by Simon Curtis. There’s a birth, a death, a proposal, a spot of disputed paternity and the usual pot-pourri of fine and wooden acting, good and silly dialogue.
About a quarter of it rings true. But the sets and costumes are fabulous, which is all it takes to get back into the Abbey habit. n A LonGer version of this review ran in Tuesday’s paper.