Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Downton Abbey is the last TV show I watched every episode of, before essentially swearing off all new television, so I wasn't gonna skip the movies. The first series of Julian Fellowes' delightful update on the old Upstairs/Downstairs period melodrama impressed with its superb cast and inventive narrative threads. Even though the show's writing had deteriorated to just another late-night soap (I mean, "prestige television series"), it was a fun way to spend evenings with ma Lady. I enjoyed Fellowes' first big-screen adaptation of the series, directed by veteran TV and stage director Michael Engler, but the second movie, Downton Abbey: A New Era, helmed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Woman in Gold, Goodbye Christopher Robin), was just dreadful. Curtis and Fellowes are back with a similar phone-on film for this final chapter in the Downton story. Set in the 1930s, even the presence of Noël Coward (blandly played by Arty Froushan) can't make this finale feel even the least bit grand.

Fellowes deservedly won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2001 for Gosford Park, a script so assured that even Robert Altman had to play it grudging respect. And Fellowes rightly racked up a slew of awards for the first Downton series. How far he's fallen in the last half-century of doing this show. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is what ChatGPT would write for you if you fed it all the prior Downton scripts and asked it to write a final movie that gives every character about the same number of lines. As with the previous picture, there is no narrative arc to speak of, just a series of 90-second scenes each lasting one beat. The structure is as follows: a problem is introduced, then we revisit the other seven or eight "storylines" to see what's happened since we left them, and by the time we return to the problem we had just established, the issue has been resolved. It's mind-numbingly sloppy writing that's been stitched together like a drunk trying to carry fourteen heavy treys up six flights of stairs. Editor Adam Recht (who also cut A New Era) is just not up to this challenge. Plus, he makes three inexcusably bad cuts in the first 20 minutes. What might these two films have been like had they been handled by Mark Day, the editor of the first Downton Abbey film, as well as The Company You Keep, Ex Machina, and the last four Harry Potter films?

Of the twenty-five main characters vying for screening time in this mess, the only one who seems to merit anything resembling an "A-storyline" is Lady Mary Talbot, the eldest daughter of Downton's Lord and Lady Grantham. Since Maggie Smith died between this film and the last one, that means that Michelle Dockery is the only actor in the series to have made it all the way through every season, special, and movie as a full-blooded character. I guess that's fitting, since Dockery elegantly embodied the reserved, resilient, initially cold but ultimately compassionate heir to Downton Abbey almost as well as Smith personified the outagiously outspoken Dowager Countess of Grantham. The final scene, though not nearly as moving as it should be after all these years, fittingly finds a way for these two actresses to share the frame in such a way that I wonder if, thirty years from now, Smith and Dockery's characters will be the only two we remember from this exceedingly popular series.