Less is not more as Downton moves with the times to its grand finale

4 days ago 3

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE
★★★★
PG. 123 minutes

Julian Fellowes and the rest of the Downton Abbey team were not exaggerating in labelling their new film their grand finale.

They’re not just bidding farewell to a much loved television series and its spin-offs, they’re presenting us with a shamelessly nostalgic wallow in the last stage of the British aristocracy’s heyday.

It’s 1930 and the upper classes are still enjoying their fondest traditions – the London season, Ascot and the creaky splendours of their country houses – but World War I has left an indelible mark on the future of a generation and the rich are still reeling from the reverberations of the Wall Street crash. Change is in the air and the film’s small moments are sometimes more instructive than its big set-pieces.

My favourite scene confronts Hugh Bonneville’s Lord Grantham with the concept of downsizing. His daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) takes him to inspect a mansion flat in Kensington. At first, he must face the fact that he would be going “along” to bed rather than “up”. Then he’s startled by muffled sounds from the flat above. Looking around dolefully, he says the flat would make him feel as if he were living in a “layer cake of strangers”.

But whatever happens, Downton itself is to remain in the family. And Mary will be in charge, despite the shock of her divorce from Matthew Goode’s Henry Talbot, who’s no longer in the cast list.

She’s now notorious. In one of the opening scenes, she arrives, dressed appropriately in scarlet, at one of the season’s most fashionable balls only to be told to leave. Her panic-stricken hostess explains that the Prince of Wales, of all people, will be offended by the presence of a divorced woman.

Disaster. She wastes no time in retreating to Downton, where the loyalty of the Downton household – upstairs and downstairs – works a few predictable miracles. What’s more, relief comes from an unexpected quarter. Fresh from his West End success with Bittersweet, Noel Coward (an impeccably polished Arty Froushan) comes to stay and his appeal proves to be seductive enough to sweep aside all class barriers and the prejudices that go with them.

The film’s costume department, however, is not dropping its standards. It’s established a reputation for being able to marry the elegance of its designs with a strong feel for social history and its work is looking more alluring than ever.

Fellowes has never disguised his affection for the excesses and affectations of a class which has sustained his career for decades but his admiration comes tempered by a gentle sense of the ridiculous. The downstairs cast make up a Greek chorus of constructive critics of the goings-on on the other side of the baize door. And while the writing can verge on condescension, the actors have inhabited these characters for so long that they have developed a subtle understanding of their every aspect.

And they, too, are grappling with change. Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton), who’s now running the County Fair, outrages its florid-faced chairman, Sir Hector Moreland (Simon Russell Beale) by indulging her liberal inclinations and inviting Carson (Jim Carter), Downton’s butler, and Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), its outspoken kitchen maid, on to the committee. And Mr Molesley (Kevin Doyle), once a Downton servant, is now a screenwriter and he’s belatedly realising that the hierarchy on a film set places the writer on the bottom of the food chain.

It’s fun and because the nostalgia is rooted so firmly in a shared sense of history, there’s a lot of pathos in the inevitability of its ending. Less is more? Not this time.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is in cinemas from September 11.

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