Focus Features
“Downton Abbey” is a phenomenon. It’s far from the first multi-year British television saga to find an American audience on PBS. However, none of its predecessors, neither “Upstairs Downstairs” nor “The Forsyte Saga,” seized the uplands of the popular imagination as successfully. For six seasons, a significantly large audience followed a noble family, and their servants, across decades and through the Great War into a less certain future.
The Downton Abbey film picks up the story’s threads and weaves them in familiar patterns. The core of the original cast is reunited, and the movie opens with a glimpse of Buckingham Palace stationery. A liveried footman bears the letter down the regal hall; it’s packed in a Royal Mail sack and carried by train to the village near the Crawley estate. A motorcycle postman runs the special delivery up the winding road as the Abbey’s stone-wedding cake façade looms in view.
Eyes are arched when Barrow (Rob James-Collier), the butler, reads the return address. The Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) and Lady Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery) look up from breakfast when the message is brought to them. “Just arrived my lord,” the servant says. The king and queen intend to visit Yorkshire and stay at Downtown Abbey. “Just for a night,” Lady Mary says, visibly relieved at the short duration.
The royal visit triggers the mechanism of a plot that involve key characters from the series. However, in this chapter of the saga, the Earl and Countess of Grantham hover in the background. Much of the story concerns the enmity between Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), whose sharp tongue animates the dialogue, and Lady Maud Bagshaw (Imelda Staunton). As in many families, even of more modest means, the terms of inheritance become a source of strife.
The downstairs corridors of the Abbey receive as much attention as the drawing rooms above. The former butler Carson (Jim Carter) returns from retirement to help the fussbudgetty cook, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), and the staff contend with the arrival of their majesties. But before the maids can even polish the silver, a team of Buckingham Palace servants invade Downton with the blunt force of a commando raid. The supercilious king’s page (David Haig) announces that he’s in charge. The Abbey’s servants plan an insurrection.
A note of uncertainty sounds with the arrival in town of a mysterious figure who might be a police detective eying the Irish Republican, Tom Branson (Allen Leech), the onetime chauffeur who married into the Crawleys in a love-driven leap of social mobility. But uncertainty is in the air as Lady Mary wonders how they will find money to repair the roof and retain the army of servants necessary to maintain their lordly way of life in a rapidly changing world. Some of the staff, especially Daisy (Sophie McShera), are rebellious and chafe under the old norms.
Aspects of Downton Abbey are silly, even caricatured, yet on the whole, the movie accommodates the stories of a wide expanse of characters of different classes, temperaments and even sexual persuasion. Barrow, a gay man at a time when indiscretion could lead to ruin (and jail), discovers an underground men’s club where the band plays hot jazz. Even newcomers to the saga will have no trouble understanding the characters and their motivations.
The allure of Downton Abbey? It offers an escape into an imagined world where our own society is comfortably reflected amidst the baronial luxury. Jealousy, class envy and condescension, family secrets, the possibility of reconciliation—the human stories are nicely drawn. Downton Abbey is a gilded palace of dreams where continuity is valued but change is acknowledged—where affairs of state are conducted with a dignity inconceivable in the America of 2019.
And yes, the story has no end. Expect a sequel.
