After 15 years, six television series and two feature films – not to mention a peerage for its creator, Julian Fellowes – the heavy velvet curtains are finally swishing shut on Downton Abbey.
With Downton you can never say never, but, with the clue in the sub-title, this third film is said to be the last.
It is dedicated to Dame Maggie Smith. Her character, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, died at the end of the last picture and now, sadly, she has followed suit.
There are other characters about to leave Downton, too, although happily not head-first. Beetle-browed butler Mr Carson (Jim Carter) is on the cusp of retirement, as is the cook, formerly known as Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol).
If you know your Downton, you’ll be aware that nothing more seismic could happen to the great house, short of it burning to the ground, than Mr Carson leaving.
He knows it too, which is why he keeps turning up like a pensioned-off football manager, certain that nobody can get a tune out of his old players like he can.
Hearteningly, other things haven’t changed at all. Elizabeth McGovern (whose husband Simon Curtis is the film’s director) still simpers her lines as Lady Grantham, instead of merely speaking them. And Mr Barrow’s personality transplant remains firmly in place. Mr Barrow (Robert James-Collier), you’ll recall, was once Downton’s pantomime villain, all but swirling a black cloak every time he appeared.
But for a while now he has been affability itself. Coming to terms with his sexuality drained all the poison and turned him into someone quite different.
So what of the actual plot? Actually, there isn’t one. Downton films are really just whole seasons of TV episodes compressed into a couple of hours, with multiple storylines generously scattered, like salt over the breakfast kedgeree. Some work and some don’t.
The decision to turn daft Mr Molesley (Kevin Doyle) into a screenwriter was not one of the better ones. Another concerns the divorce of Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), which becomes final on the day of a grand ball at the London mansion of Lady Petersfield (Joely Richardson).
When news of the decree nisi reaches Lady Petersfield she starts hyperventilating with shock. She’s expecting royalty, and a newly-divorced woman cannot be in their orbit. It’s unthinkable. Meanwhile, newspaper photographers have gathered outside. A high-society divorcee is front-page news.
This, and I write with affection and respect, is classic Fellowes. His film is set in 1930, and period detail crams the foreground as well as the background. Divorce means social ruin. The term ‘weekend’ is decidedly outre (‘I’m glad Mama isn’t alive to hear you say that word,’ Hugh Bonneville’s Lord Grantham tells Lady Mary).
The Ivy restaurant has recently opened on West St, the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane. And effervescently witty playwright Noel Coward (Arty Froushan) is the toast of the town. Cannily, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) finds a way of using Coward’s reputation to rehabilitate that of her disgraced sister, Lady Mary. The siblings have always been at loggerheads but Downton’s tectonic plates (no relation to the Wedgwood plates) are shifting.
Lord G might even be forced to sell his London home, Grantham House, and move into something called a block of flats, a peculiar concept, ‘a sort of layer cake of strangers’.
Yes, money is tight, especially now that the mighty wealth of Lady G’s American family has been squandered by her chump of a brother (Paul Giamatti), whose handsome financial adviser (Alessandro Nivola) might as well have a label on his forehead reading ‘con-man’.
Of course, it’s not his forehead that Lady Mary is interested in. Downtonologists will recall that her healthy sexual appetite once ensnared her a Turkish delight, Mr Pamuk, and, without wishing to sound coarse, she’s still at it.
She’s not the only one. Mrs Bates (Joanne Froggatt) has a bun in the oven, and it’s not one of Mrs Patmore’s, whose protegee, dopey Daisy (Sophie McShera), is no longer a dope. Gaining in confidence by the minute, Daisy is even co-opted onto the committee of the Yorkshire County Show, to the horror of pompous local squire Sir Hector Moreland (Simon Russell Beale).
I impart all this information not as one big spoiler but rather as reassurance. It’s corny and formulaic, sometimes even preposterous, but two hours immersed in Downton is fundamentally the same as it’s always been, like luxuriating in a warm bath. And hurrah for that. I’ll rather miss it.
Verdict: ★★★★✩
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale opens across the UK on September 12
