After six seasons, five Christmas specials, and three feature films, Downton Abbey finally ends where it all began: with the illusion of change. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for longtime fans of the upstairs-downstairs drama, which debuted in 2010. Downton has always tried to have its cake and eat it too, with stories that nominally challenge the early 20th-century British aristocracy while also luxuriating in the premise. In its final act — a two-hour theatrical release by Simon Curtis, appropriately titled Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — it brings more of the same to the table, but peppers it with just enough hints of nostalgia (and narrative finality) to make this umpteenth ending feel definitive.
It’s no secret that the series has long outstayed its welcome, having now played past the onscreen death of its most electric character: the witty, cantankerous Dowager Countess Violet Crawley. The Grand Finale is even dedicated to the actress who played her, Dame Maggie Smith, who passed away last year, and her absence is made palpable, both intentionally and otherwise. It’s an often unbalanced film, one that unfolds far too gloomily for such a wistful victory lap.
And yet, when the target audience consists entirely of people who have refused to abandon Downton Abbey, playing the hits becomes all too easy. The result is a film that’s impossible to hate if you’re already on-board with its conceit, aimed squarely at delightful fan service, and nudging a needle that has refused to move in nearly a decade, when the TV show originally came to a close. Is this really the final chapter? It may not even matter for a series that has, in some fashion, been bidding farewell to its audience (and to a way of life) ever since it first began.
What is Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale about?
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While the Great Depression looms, the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 hasn’t yet made waves in Britain when the film begins (though it eventually factors into the plot). A Swing rendition of the show’s grandiose opening theme lures us through London’s West End, as a neon sign boasting a “1930 Revue” hovers overhead. A long, unbroken take welcomes the audience inside one of the theatres, where a song-and-dance performance enraptures the upper-class Crawley family: patriarch Robert (Hugh Bonneville); his American wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern); their happily married younger daughter, Edith (Laura Carmichael); and their scandal-ridden oldest, Mary (Michelle Dockery), who becomes involved with the mysterious financial advisor (Alessandro Nivola) of her American uncle (Paul Giamatti).
The Lords and Ladies of Grantham are accompanied to the theatre by their various footmen and ladies maids, who are all too happy to be sitting in the cheap seats, before the family heads backstage to catch up with one of the stars, Guy Dexter (Dominic West), and his “assistant” (see: lover) Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), a former Downton butler. The film is funny and intriguing during this reunion — a brief “previously on” of sorts, since the last movie, A New Era, featured Guy using Downton as a movie set — and it involves the hilarity of Robert being scandalized by scantily clad actresses, and the nature of Guy and Barrow’s dynamic. However, this recap-centric introduction doesn’t last, and the film soon splinters in awkward ways, hurrying Barrow (the only character with an ostensibly happy ending) far into the background.
Much of the drama is split between the Crawley’s “London Season” and their opulent country estate — the setting of much of the series — but their two homes are so indistinct (including the kitchen and servant’s quarters) that it’s occasionally hard to tell who’s where. Mary, ever the socialite, is in the papers once again for her impending divorce, while her family (and her maids and butlers) try to protect and maintain her image — as is their holy duty. However, when all the characters finally converge at the family home, the movie finally stops hopping and skipping around in space and time, and settles into a familiar rhythm.
Downton Abbey’s strange social dynamics are The Grand Finale’s charm.
Change is clearly coming to Downton. Gone is the age of class division, or so the series has been saying for 15 years (nearly 20 within the story). However, much more interesting than the Crawleys grumbling about having to give up their position for the millionth time is, as always, the striking downstairs drama of the working class dealing with this oncoming transformation, albeit as people who, by and large, seem to worship their social positions.
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The only time Downton featured anything resembling a radical or revolutionary was when the Crawley’s driver, the Irish Republican Tom Branson (Allen Leech) married into the family, and happily became part of the system when his wife was killed by a chronic case of actor contract negotiations (an illness that has long ravaged the ensemble). So, rather than running the risk of upsetting the now fine-tuned status quo, writer and show creator Julian Fellowes frames older members of the household as being in their professional twilight years.
Diligent head butler Charlie Carson (Jim Carter) has a day left before retirement. Head cook Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is set to hand over the kitchen to the once-ambitious Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), while the various other maids and footmen are set for a reshuffling of duties, and a blurring of social lines when it comes to who has a say in the town’s fair. But! There is to be one last major social event at Downton. One last fancy dinner, for which the old guard staves off obsolescence — one last mission, as it were — setting the stage of yet another instance of Downton’s clockwork catering.
A story with more respect for its working class characters might have broken this narrative mold a long time ago, but were anything to actually change onscreen, the show’s very premise would be immediately upset. The Downton estate has gone through radical metamorphoses, from war hospital to movie set, but everyone has their designated place in its regal hierarchy, as is the franchise’s escapist allure. There’s no opulence without an underclass, and although Downton Abbey has historical echoes (and in this case, an actual historical figure, in the form of Arty Froushan as playwright Noël Coward), it remains an ahistorical fantasy in which the tides of change are an inevitable, perhaps even superhuman, force untethered from the real concerns of working people — who aren’t just content with their place in the world, but seem to fight to keep the “old ways” intact.
It is, in a realistic sense, tragic to see Daisy claim that she’ll one day move beyond service (something she’s been repeating since day one) while still being thrilled by her lofty position as the Crawley’s new cook. But this is Downton Abbey after all, and what would its Grand Finale be without the conservative melodrama of “the way things were”? Even Joseph Mosely (Kevin Doyle), the sad-clown former butler who has actually broken the mold and become a screenwriter, gets put in his place by their upper classes. But Doyle is such an incredible comedic talent that any trajectory but schadenfreude would have also felt inorganic.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is ugly, in more ways than one.
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Downton’s biggest strength has always been its operatic whiplash; for instance, the drama of soufflé not setting in time was once contrasted with a rape-revenge narrative. The contours of The Grand Finale aren’t quite so extreme, but this lack of overt melodrama may be owed to a single missing ingredient: the fearsome, irascibly funny Dowager Countess. Without Dame Maggie Smith’s expert ability to balance realistic drama with ludicrous indignity, the rest of the cast is forced to work overtime to take on both these roles, and no one rises to the occasion.
With both the character and actress having passed on, there was no respectful way to include Lady Violet in the proceedings, so the film instead opts to frame each of its scenes with a murky palette. It appears the Countess may have taken all the key grips with her to the other side, as the cinematography in neither interior nor exterior scenes seem to shape light in any meaningful way. It’s all enveloped in shadow, a strange decision for an ostensible soap-comedy of stiff upper lips.
This doesn’t seem accidental either, as the few moments where light does actually enter the frame always circle memories and recollections of Lady Violet, as though she had taken all the series’ light with her. It is, on one hand, thematically coherent, but it also feels like the entirely wrong approach for a film where memories of the Countess make up but a fraction of the story. More potent and pertinent are Robert’s fears of losing his status once and for all, an anxiety that seems to envelope that of losing his mother, so the movie’s gloominess ends up taking on an amusingly (if accidentally) political bent, as though the arrival of social change is akin to a suffocating darkness.
Credit: Rory Mulvey / Focus Features
For better or worse, this rare aesthetic departure from the series’ glitz and glamour results in its most extreme melodrama yet. It makes Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale the series’ ultimate paean to high nobility. And while it ends on an appropriately nostalgic note, recalling many of the series’ high points, its memories are so deeply entangled with its unchanging norms that its final moments — the movie’s rare bright scenes, bathed in golden light — sing the praises of wealth and status in hilariously wistful fashion. It lays the series bare, as if to say: This was Downton Abbey all along, a tale of devotion to the religion of capital and class, buoyed by characters so delightful they kept us coming back for more. If nothing else, its final chapter is refreshingly honest, if accidentally so.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale opens in theaters Sept. 12.
