Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is a work at fascinating odds with itself. On one hand, the film is the ultimate nostalgia bait, the third spinoff of Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs series that debuted in 2010 and has endured, in some form or another, since then. It goes down easy, the atmosphere so enveloping that you basically forget how this whole project is a love letter to the aristocracy and a patronizing pat on the head for the working class. On the other hand, despite being the narratively thinnest film in the franchise, The Grand Finale is also the most existentially despairing, driven by the questions of what it takes to enact social change and, ultimately, what it means to leave Downton Abbey behind.
The Grand Finale offers answers that are totally unsurprising. Time marches forward, and there’s nothing we do can stop it. The new generation will always make choices their elders don’t quite understand. Capitalism is better than socialism. (I don’t agree with that one, but The Grand Finale makes that point at least three times!) Downton Abbey fans have seen this all before. But that also might be what makes The Grand Finale such an effective end point for this franchise. It reassures us that everything the ever-growing Crawley family holds dear — their money, their property, their proximity to power, and their belief in the royal hierarchy as the best way to rule — remains worthy of protection, and it also offers the thinnest sliver of forward progress to appease any worries that the series’ interest in the past is also an explicit endorsement of conservatism or traditionalism. It’s a perfect threading of the fanciful fan-service needle, aside from the fact that (spoiler alert!) Matthew Goode isn’t onscreen for even one moment. He’s now claimed two scheduling conflicts as reasons he doesn’t appear in these movies; was Dept. Q worth missing out on Goode in a tuxedo? Arguable.
Just like how the previous film, A New Era, was a fairly meta experiment in what it takes to make a Downton Abbey movie, The Grand Finale is a meta experiment in what it takes to end the whole thing. (Simon Curtis directed this one, too.) Set in 1930, The Grand Finale begins a couple years after the events of A New Era, with everyone on the precipice of change. In A New Era’s final act, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), told his eldest daughter, Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), that Downton Abbey and the future of the family were now in her hands. Similarly, longtime Downton butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) was finally preparing to retire and hand the running of the home’s staff over to former footman Andy (Michael Fox). What would these men, whose decades were defined by service, do when their time is over? What would their purpose be?
The Grand Finale equates these questions as if these men are of the same class, because it’s always been part of Fellowes’s imagination that Lord and Lady Grantham and all their family members are extremely considerate, kind, patient, and generous toward their household staff, no matter how anachronistic that characterization may be, as though the kindness would erase the massive wealth gaps with which these characters live. And he applies the same Pollyannaish touch to the film’s other source of drama: Lady Mary’s divorce from her second husband, race-car driver Henry Talbot (Goode). In this age of gossip columnists and paparazzi photographers, Mary is immediately shamed by negative press coverage of her divorce, and she becomes a social pariah as soon as the news gets out. (Viewers of The Gilded Age, Fellowes’s currently airing 1880s-set historical drama, will recognize that the writer is doing some double-dipping here; the impact of a high-society lady’s divorce is also a major plot point in the HBO series’ third season.) Mary’s family is ready to go to war for her, but they have bigger things to worry about when Lady Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) brother Harold Levinson (Paul Giamatti) arrives in London to discuss the settling of their mother’s estate. The fact that Harold brings along an unknown-to-the-family American businessman named Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola) is weird, but Gus is such a smooth talker, effective flirter, and loquacious flatterer that Mary lets her guard down — maybe to her detriment.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Downton Abbey’s (white) ensemble grew more sprawling with each season and film, and a number of other story lines — one about a county fair and one on the entertainment industry — fly around The Grand Finale to appease them all. (A New Era had a Black band performing in Paris; The Grand Finale has a silent South Asian family bowing to nobles while watching the horse races — that’s all the diversity you’ll get in this ever-so-genteel version of Europe before World War II.) In typical Fellowes fashion, all these subplots involve class and social status in some way, and also in typical Fellowes fashion, they all boil down to “Isn’t it wonderful when the rich are nice to the workers whose labor funds their privilege? But, like, don’t get any revolutionary ideas!” How this franchise has eroded the initially shit-kicking ideologies of Allen Leech’s former Irish socialist Tom Branson boggles the mind; as if his saving the king from assassination in A New Era weren’t enough, in this film he says being a capitalist is simply “being sensible.” Fellowes’s affection for the monarchy is explicit and implicit, and his writing treats the briefest moments of attention from the wealthy — actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West) remembering Downton’s staff; playwright and composer Noël Coward (Arty Froushan) acknowledging the work of footman turned screenwriter Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) — like earth-shattering events of diplomacy. Attempting any kind of praxis read of The Grand Finale is a fool’s errand.
Yet The Grand Finale moves briskly because it’s the cinematic equivalent of great gowns, beautiful gowns. John Lunn’s soaring score makes shots of Highclere Castle, which stands in for Downton Abbey, particularly magical; Anna Robbins’s luxurious costumes, all satin, lace, and brocade, are once again gorgeous; Nivola’s smirk is a welcome bit of Yankee attitude. (God, that smirk!) The resplendent production and art design complement theater shows, dinner parties, horse races, and carnival outings, and the deeply experienced cast members hit all their marks of humor and pathos. Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable, especially in how it’s a movie for the girlbosses, with Mary, Cora, Isobel (Penelope Wilton), and Lady Edith Pelham (Laura Carmichael) all getting moments to tell men what’s what, another recurring Downton Abbey bit; how gracious of their elder male counterparts to step aside so they can step forward. Lord Grantham’s disgust with the word “weekend” would have been the film’s funniest moment, until Harold falls asleep reading Charles Dickens and asks if Downton Abbey has any murder mysteries in its library, only to be snippily told by the butler that there might be some in the nursery. This film has no interest in the family’s children; they only appear onscreen to be read to and play bucolically with their nannies. But Fellowes’s formula provides such smooth-brained pleasure that I wouldn’t be surprised if Downton Abbey: The New Class materializes in a decade’s time. This franchise may claim it’s finally leaping into the future, but its identity will always be in an idealized version of a wealthy white past.
