It’s 1930, and society is changing; with those changes as well as old mores threatening the residents of Downton Abbey.
This is meant to be the last Downton Abbey film in the franchise, but is it really the end? I would not be surprised if in five years they’re rebooting the whole thing but with the 21st century Crawleys raising money for a new roof by pimping out the Abbey as a setting for a TV series about an aristocratic family set in 1912, with an ancient Lord George Crawley overseeing everything with a gimlet eye. The family scandals will revolve around something controversial a tweenage Crawley has put on Discord.
I watch a lot more films than TV, and the great thing about Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is that you don’t need to have seen any of the show’s 52 episodes to (a) work out who’s who and (b) thoroughly enjoy the whole ridiculous shebang. I managed perfectly well on just years-old memories of the first movie and all the memes, but you could probably do it on memes alone (and you’d get the “weekend” reference).
With Lady Mary’s now-public, very scandalous divorce, the respective heads of upstairs and downstairs handing over the reins of the house to the younger generations, and even Isobel Grey (Penelope Wilton) adding two servants to the Yorkshire Show organising committee, The Grand Finale covers the huge changes (huge being in the eye of the beholder) buffeting the Crawley family and wider society in the early 1930s.
But the plot is of little consequence (I’ve forgotten most of it already), as if you like gorgeous outfits, extremely posh people being amusingly rude to each other, old-fashioned scandal and “mild sex references”, you’ll love this.
Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) and his family continue to make mountains out of molehills and molehills out of mountains. We don’t have anything as exciting as Downton Abbey’s broken boiler from the first film but I particularly liked that the nasty conman villain of the piece this time is punished not by the law, or even a punch-up, but with a stern talking to from Edith Pelham (Laura Carmichael).
Series creator and writer Julian Fellowes jemmies in a plea for us to recognise the importance of the writer (of which I entirely approve) as poor Mr Molesley, now penning film scripts, tries to catch the attention of playwright Noel Coward (a delightfully puckish Arty Froushan). However mainly, Fellowes – firmly from the upper crust himself – does a very good job of making us feel sorry for a family which, having endured for centuries on the backs of the lower classes, now has to consider selling their other massive house.
It’s impressive, as despite the real life financial and societal earthquakes faced by the upper class (great houses sold off, fewer servants, the 1929 financial crash depleting the stock of wealthy American heiresses available to save our most impecunious lords) the aristocracy always endures, as they learned long ago how to bend with the prevailing winds, and are happy to lose a few along the way to ensure the class system’s continued success and their position atop it.
Still, for a couple of hours I lowered my northern hackles and was sternly Team Downton as they navigate this brave new world, while also enduring brickbats from the old one. Of course they want divorce to be normalised, and they reject the cruelty and unfairness of Lady Mary’s instant social ostracism, but they also like the trappings of wealth and status, even as they ponder at breakfast whether they should get used to cooking their own food.
I loved Paul Giamatti as the naïve Uncle Harold, over from America to explain, embarrassed, where the Levinson family money has gone, and also Alessandro Nivola as his slippery, overly-forward friend and adviser Gus. (The Crawleys’ obliviousness when faced with this obvious wrong ‘un reminded me of Saltburn from the also extremely posh Emerald Fennell. The films are very different but the lack of guile in both Fennell’s Catton family and Fellowes’s Crawleys shows how a class system that props one up for generations can also make one soft.)
Actually this final Downton outing is all about the women. The absence of Dame Maggie Smith’s Violet Crawley may be keenly felt by family and servants, even as her portrait stares out everyone who dares glance up in the grand hallway; but the Crawley sisters are more than capable of taking the reins. Michelle Dockery is icily brilliant as Lady Mary, leading the charge into the future as a divorced woman and soon to be the new chatelaine of Downton. Her relationship with her sister Edith (Carmichael using baby imperiousness to fabulous effect) is a treat, as they spar with each other like only sisters could, but now, older and wiser, also having each other’s backs. Meanwhile below stairs, Daisy (Sophie McShera) is capably taking over as cook, and in her spare time standing up to the local boorish squire as she strives to make the county show more accessible to its actual visitors.
Naturally there is a heavy dose of schmaltz to cater for modern sensibilities, which is both less than believable – would an elderly county dowager really apologise for her treatment of Mary, post-divorce? – and would surely have been loathed by the spiky, forthright Crawleys, if they existed. Still, this is entertainment, and as my favourite film is about an alien 100 years’ hence stalking a crew who are still allowed to smoke in their workplace, who am I to call out artistic licence?
If I have any other criticism it’s a fairly niche one, that the below stairs scenes are so dark it’s sometimes hard to work out what is going on. Lighting is important in this film, often obviously so; the ending sees Lord and Lady Grantham walking off into golden sunlight worthy of a Mr Kipling commercial, both the sunset on a glorious but unsustainable age, and the sunrise of a new dawn at Downton Abbey.
There is no mid-credits scene in Downton Abbey: The Grand finale, however we do see snapshots of the characters in the near future.
Missed a bit? Read my Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale plot re-cap here.
Watch the trailer for Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale