Downton Abbey

In the past few weeks I’ve seen The Souvenir, Pain and Glory, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Lion King. And yet the film I feel inspired to break my review drought with is Downton Abbey. Yes, maybe I shouldn’t have drunk so much though the Hogg/Almodóvar double bill…

I saw Downton Abbey in a small cinema in the north-west of Ireland (shout-out to Lifford-Strabane Cineplex – bridging communities since the 1996) a showing full of ‘non-regular’ cinema-goers. And this audience profile is exactly why it’s beating the box office of other big releases this week (hello Ad Astra). Downton is a film with a built-in audience who’ve stuck with these characters through entailment, engagements, and entitlement.

The plot, much to the bemusement of my husband and fellow reviewer Emmett, is exactly as it appears from the trailer. The king and queen are arriving with relatively short notice and Downton Abbey must prepare to host them. It’s less Gosford Park and more 1920s ‘Challenge Anneka’. I haven’t watched Downton since season 1 but I’ve had a vague grasp of goings-on via its presence in the pop culture ether. It doesn’t matter anyway. The film is intended to be such a lulling soporific for the times that you can go in without having seen an episode and be entirely satisfied you’ve missed nothing for it.

Within the Royal Visit plot engine, other stories play out to greater or lesser import. There’s a kitchen maid who (yet again, if memory serves) isn’t sure if she wants to marry her fiancé, a pregnant Lady who would like her husband to be around for the birth of their first child rather than swanning off on a colonial tour, and a light-fingered royal seamstress. These storylines, if they can be called such, offer some filler between discussions about the Royal Visit, and are treated fairly lightly. More weightier subplots though, like an LGBT awakening for Barrow, an Irish Republican assassination attempt, and a plot around illegitimacy, are dealt with equally lightly. That’s not the point of Downton Abbey. The point is, we just want to escape for two hours and wander about above and below stairs one final (?) time.

Some starry guest appearances are made by the likes of Geraldine James and Imelda Staunton, who all bring a wonderful and appropriate upper-class pedigree to proceedings. The core cast to which we’ve become accustomed play out their roles to perfection. As if anything else was possible. Julian Fellowes is writing on autopilot here, but it’s too obvious and deliberate to be a detraction from the whole endeavour, which very much accomplishes what it intends to achieve.

Something that struck me more in watching the film, compared to the episodes, was its intensely conservative nature. Yes, I know. Big whoop, and duh. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that a story about class in England has to adopt one side or another. Instead, through multiple points in the film, characters express very particular Establishment opinions at the expense of proffered alternatives. In a scene with the light-fingered royal seamstress, for example, she quite rightly highlights the perversity that there are trinkets on ladies’ tables that she could not hope to afford with a year’s wages. The response, however, takes the position that stealing is wrong, and moreover, wouldn’t it be absolutely dreadful if people thought Her Majesty herself was the one pilfering these trinkets. Individual moral decency is throughout invoked to thwart genuine socialist or anti-Imperialist grievances. Yes, I know, it’s Downton Abbey, but I really did hope for more of a glimmer of 21st century politics in this 1920s tale.

Downton Abbey achieves and surpasses its goals in this feature-length adaptation. It has been so successful that perhaps we can expect a further cinematic outing in the future. Nevertheless, beyond the comforting slo-mo of silver salvers, jewels, and gowns, there lurks something a bit rotten in the heart of the Establishment.