Tim Robey gives his verdict
Downton Abbey PG, 122 min
Excitement levels at the big-screen version of
Downton Abbey – essentially a lavish, two-hour reunion putting out the best tea service – have been considerable but might need tempering. Upscaling the cosy charms of the series hasn’t entirely worked and you couldn’t say this comfortably belongs in a cinema.
Between 1912 and 1926, the period covered during Downton’s life on TV, England changed momentously. The funny thing about the film, set in 1927, is that, despite passing references to austerity and the previous year’s General Strike, the world it recreates has inched forward hardly one iota.
In the green and pleasant Yorkshire countryside, the huge, hereditary pile of the Crawley family squats as it ever did, a testament to muddling along.
“What are we going to do about Downton?”, the heirs to the estate, still overseen by Hugh Bonneville’s Earl of Grantham, wonder, knowing full well the answer is a variation on nothing much.
Since the series ended in 2015, the idea Julian Fellowes and co set about exploring – the stability of English life – has been subject to far more turmoil off-screen than on. Perhaps in recognition of this very point,
Downton Abbey is a retreat into a relatively becalmed history bubble.
Because some sense of cinematic ceremony is called for, though, Fellowes cooks up a royal visit. For one night only – as part of a Yorkshire tour loosely based on one that really took place in 1912 – George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (a shrewdly in-charge Geraldine James) will be gracing Downton with their presence.
“This won’t help us economise,” muses Grantham as he beholds the Palace letterhead with surprise, and sets his panicked household to work.
Just like every episode before it, the film is 80 per cent preparatory bustle – but with extra pressure on buffing the silverware – and definitely more extravagant helicopter shots of the mansion glowing at dawn.
Grantham and his wife Cora (rogue American Elizabeth Mcgovern) get surprisingly little to do amid this
flustered pageant beyond hoping all goes to plan. Fellowes divides our time, as usual, between nuggets of intrigue among their fellow aristocrats and rumblings of discord in the servants’ quarters, which erupt with indignation when the King and Queen’s retinue arrive mob-handed.
To a man, the royal staff, headed by David Haig’s solemn master of ceremonies, are hoity-toity nightmares who don’t give a fig for Downton tradition. In other words, they have to be smartly shown their place, subdued in a mock-heroic mini-revolution that’s contrived like a heist to avoid the slightest ripple upstairs. The film ticks along, mainly thanks to this frenzy, while also showing its own evidence of nervous strain.
A royal assassination attempt, daft and implausible, is over in a flash – subplots about boiler repair and letteropener theft get more screen time.
There’s more redemptive progress in the life of Thomas (Robert Jamescollier), a gay footman-turned-butler whom the series tended to peg as a dastardly wrong ’un: at last he’s allowed to take a step or two toward self-acceptance, albeit in the hushhush way demanded by the era. He gets a jolly knees-up at a men-only speakeasy – a rather far-fetched addition to Yorkshire’s interwar social scene but worth it to get him out of the house.
Old sparring partners Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith have the usual snippy workout, trading barbs about Machiavelli and Caligula while scheming to find out in what wasteful direction Lady Maud (Imelda Staunton), estranged cousin of Smith’s reliably withering dowager Countess, plans to fling her inheritance.
Director Michael Engler, a veteran of the series, is mainly faced here with the logistical challenge of compressing life-changing conversations into vaguely pregnant chit-chats while pausing with metronomic regularity to admire the table service.
It’s a thoroughly tidy business, wrapping everything up in a bow for the built-in audience, and giving us lofty reassurances that Downton will stay put generations down the line.
As for any further visits, the cast of this luxury soap might not stagger on quite as long as all that but you wouldn’t rule out a couple more Christmas specials.
Downton Abbey is in cinemas on Friday