The Drooling Class

A £194 million return on a £20 million budget, when combined with a built-in audience and established name recognition, means only one thing: guaranteed sequel! So here we are with Downton Abbey: A New Era, directed by Simon Curtis, written by Julian Fellowes (the creator of the TV show) and starring all the usual suspects.

I find myself sort of wondering about what it is exactly that makes this a ‘new era’, as to me it all looks very similar to the old era, or at least the first film. I was taken along to see this by the family when it came out in 2019, and – to save you the bother of going back and re-reading the original review – found it rather perplexing. This is mainly because I’ve never seen an episode of the TV show, which is obviously a disadvantage when it comes to a film series which is essentially a direct continuation of it.

The general sense of bemusement persisted as the new film got underway. It opens with a wedding which basically the entire principal cast attend – with a few exceptions (genial peer Hugh Bonneville, demonic matriarch Maggie Smith, redoubtable butler Jim Carter) I had no recollection of who any of them were. But the thing to remember about Downton is that all you really need to understand is the key division between the toffs upstairs and the plebs downstairs. The toffs are delighted being waited on hand and foot; the plebs seem equally delighted to be doing the waiting, though the reasons why are more obscure.

Paying close attention to the details of the film reveals we are in the year 1928, where the two main plotlines are jolted into motion by a letter from a French lawyer, revealing that Maggie Smith has inherited a villa within spitting distance of the Riviera from a mysterious man from her past, and a request from the film company British Lion to make a movie on location at the mansion itself. (Dearie me, from producing and distributing films of the calibre of The Third Man and The Wicker Man to providing background verisimilitude in a Downton Abbey movie – sic transit gloria mundi.)

Well, mainly because the mansion needs a new roof, they agree to let all the ghastly film-making people move in for a month, but only because many of the characters will be off in France discussing the new property with its former owners, not all of whom are particularly inclined to honour the bequest. Needless to say all the below-stairs plebs get tremendously excited by the prospect of mixing with film stars (Dominic West and Laura Haddock do the honours) and even sensible-but-quietly-naughty Lady Something-or-Other lets herself get dragged into helping the production out. Meanwhile, the visitors to France struggle to cope with their alien continental ways while revelations about Maggie Smith’s past threaten to bring on an existential crisis for the earl himself…

It’s possible that the makers of the first Downton Abbey movie got a bit stung by criticisms that it was not really a film after all, but basically a double-length episode of the TV show released into cinemas. Certainly one of the trailers for the new one banged on at great length about how ‘cinematic’ it is, and how it cries out for the big screen experience. Well, there’s certainly something you could describe as cinematic about Downton Abbey: The New Era, even if it’s just the fact that it cheerfully knocks off elements from a bona fide movie like Singin’ in the Rain – there’s a plotline about an actress who looks fabulous but doesn’t have the voice for a career in talkies which feels awfully familiar. The everyone-goes-on-a-foreign-holiday storyline, on the other hand, is more of a staple of less distinguished fare like the big-screen versions of Are You Being Served? and The Inbetweeners (which Laura Haddock was also in, funnily enough).

Comparisons to the ignoble tradition of the big-screen sitcom spin-off movie seem to me to be justified, as one of the odd things about Downton Abbey: The New Era is the general tone of the thing. We’re talking, essentially, about a soap opera, which in theory should have a mixture of tones – lighter storylines mixed with more serious material. And in theory this is happening here too. But the strange thing is that everything feels like it’s being pitched as comedy: broad, knockabout comedy in the case of the plebs, something marginally more refined and sophisticated in the case of the toffs. At one point a character is given cause to doubt their parentage, their heritage, their very identity, a moment of absolute shock. And (at the screening we went to) it got a laugh. Someone dies, and – despite a bizarre, bathos-laden moment where someone performs a soliloquy from King Lear – their death scene is built around a series of zingy one-liners.

Some of the cast members are good enough to make this stuff work, but a lot of the time I think the film is trading on the existing affection the audience is presumed to have for these characters: there is, needless to say, a degree of sentimentality going on throughout. Not much effort is made to keep things accessible for newcomers, anyway – beautiful scenery and architecture only goes so far, and the structure of the film feels odd. I expected the film to start wrapping up when everyone came back from France, but it continues for a good half-hour longer wrapping up various plot elements and dealing with a whole new development that, again, won’t necessarily mean much to new viewers.

Although you do wonder what the target audience for this film actually is. I watched it with someone who has requested their identity be kept a secret, and their view – and I feel the need to stress that they really liked this film a lot more than me – was that it was ‘like a film made for people with dementia’. I know exactly what they meant – time after time, once a scene has concluded the next scene features a bunch of the supporting characters convening as a kind of Greek chorus to tell each other, in considerable detail, what has just happened in the previous scene, discuss the significance of it, and wonder about what’s going to happen next. ‘On-the-nose’ barely begins to do justice to the kind of dialogue involved in these interludes, and it’s not as if the plot is even that complicated in the first place.

Then again, as I suggested when writing about the first film, this is all an exercise in comfortable familiarity and more-of-the-same. It’s a Downton Abbey movie, and the Downton Abbey part of that formulation is vastly more important than the movie part. I thought this film was interestingly weird, but it would be a stretch to say that I honestly enjoyed any of it. Then again, I’m not sure I was ever really supposed to.