FILM
It’s a little like one of those
novelty episodes of Star Trek
where everyone goes to San
Francisco for a weekend.
Despite the tennis whites and
references to Fitzgerald and
the jazz age, I missed the
Victorian gloom that
enveloped Bates and his stock
of eminently blackmailable
plot twists. I have long since
decided the success or failure
of any Downton enterprise by
how much Bates there is in it.
The skill with which the
series used to lay a trap of
incriminating clues around
this doughty stoic, testing his
fortitude and clouding his
reputation, but forbidding
him to defend himself, lest
he accidentally incriminate
someone else, was one of
Fellowes’s greatest writing
feats. It has given rise in
my household to the
expression “as blameless as
Bates” — a platonic character
ideal of martyred innocence,
like Desdemona’s, to which
we can all aspire, if never
quite reach.
Downton Abbey brings out
the snob in everyone, but it
also confounds the snob in
everyone: just when you think
you’re above it all, that you
can’t possibly fall for its
mixture of gloss and gleam,
of chocolate-box blandness
and unembarrassable cliché,
Smith will sink one of her
withering bon mots, or
someone will show someone
else an unexpected kindness,
and you’re a puddle again —
it’s got the same potency Noël
Coward once ascribed to
cheap music.
Smith towers over this
one as she has over all of
Fellowes’s productions going
back to Gosford Park. The
match has been well nigh
perfect. Fellowes’s dialogue
never sounded better than
when being treated to one
of Smith’s perfect, almost
airless drop shots, while
Smith has been given a terrific
series of diversions as she
continues the march through
her seventies and eighties.
“When I think of these
moments from long ago, I
think I’ve been transported
to another planet,” says the
dowager countess at one
point, and the line hits home
for Smith and Fellowes, and
the Proustian sense of
transport undergirds and
animates the whole world-
building franchise. The past is
another planet. cA strange thing happened to
Downton Abbey on the way to
the big screen. Everyone looks
about 10 per cent happier
than they did on TV, and more
tanned — as if getting into
cinemas were like winning a
game show where the first
prize is a leisure cruise.
Instead of the weekly swirl of
intrigue, we get a single big
dramatic event, throwing
everyone into a tizzy. In the
first movie it was the visit of
King George and Queen Mary,
which was rather like the
moment in Close Encounters
where the mother ship
arrives: the one couple who
look down on everybody. In
the new movie, Downton
Abbey: A New Era, we get
two such developments, as if
the writer Julian Fellowes had
written two hour-long
episodes and squashed them
into a single movie.
In the first, the dowager
countess Violet Crawley
(Maggie Smith) mysteriously
inherits a villa in the south of
France from a French aristo
who seems to have carried a
torch for her for much of the
past century. Is there a
smudge of impropriety in the
countess’s past? One half of
Downton — Lord Grantham
(Hugh Bonneville), Cora
(Elizabeth McGovern), Lady
Edith (Laura Carmichael),
Carson ( Jim Carter) and Bates
(Brendan Coyle) — are
dispatched to the Côte d’Azur
in their summer linens to
investigate, while the other
half stays behind to field plot
number two.
A film company led by the
director Jack Barber (Hugh
Dancy) has invaded Downton
to shoot a silent movie, The
Gambler, starring spivvy Guy
Dexter (Dominic West) and
beautiful Myrna Dalgleish
(Laura Haddock), who looks
like Myrna Loy, but speaks in
an Eliza Doolittle Cockney
(“’Ow shud I kno?”) that would
crack the Downton china at 30
paces. What’s more, the
talkies are around the next
bend, suspending production
until someone — perhaps the
dulcet-toned Lady Mary
(Michelle Dockery) — can
overdub Myrna’s voice.
If you can forgive the
gigantic steal from Singin’ in
the Rain, the movie plot is the
juicier of the two, if only
because Fellowes has found,
in what Lord Grantham
disdainfully calls “kinema
people”, a perfect way to
invert the carefully tended
hierarchies of Downton.
While the servants ooh and
aah over the stars, everyone
else takes turns to look down
their noses at these shiny
arrivistes with their klieg
lights and hand-cranked
cameras. “We got through the
war, we can get through this,”
Crawley sniffs, but sooner orSnobs on parade
Downton brings out the worst in us — that’s why it’s irresistible
The earl fears
he might
secretly
be French
New era Elizabeth McGovern
and Laura Carmichael
ALSO RELEASEDCasablanca Beats
In cinemas and on
Curzon Home Cinema
12A, 102 min HHHThis is a drama about
teenagers expressing
themselves through rap,
filmed in a real arts centre in
Casablanca. The younger
members of the cast, who
had not performed
professionally before, are
impressive. One drawback
of the semi-documentary
approach is that the film
lacks a good storyline.
But the teenagers’
thoughts on the matters
that shape their lives —
including sexism and
religion — are invigorating.
They are conveyed through
ardent conversations as
well as hip-hop.Edward PorterHHHHH KO
HHHH A-OK HHH OK
HH So-so H No-nolater everyone is dragged into
the production, not just Mary,
but Molesley (Kevin Doyle)
and half the waiting staff.
There was something
unexpectedly touching about
the sight of all the downstairs
staff as extras, swanning
around upstairs in pleated
gowns and tiaras. You feel
something of Fellowes’s own
transatlantic brand of good
fortune wafting through the
story, giving unexpected
romantic opportunities to
Lady Mary and the closeted
gay footman Barrow (Robert
James-Collier).
Against all odds, Hollywood
rather agrees with the
denizens of Downton, much
as it did with Fellowes, who
was sprung from the salt
mines of character acting after
winning a screenwriting Oscar
for Gosford Park in 2001.
The south of France,
less so. Despite a looming
confrontation with the aristo’s
affronted widow (Nathalie
Baye), and one nice moment
where Lord Grantham fears
he might secretly be French
— “I don’t even eat garlic,” he
wails — this plotline rather
fizzles in the chalky sunshine.TOM
SHONE
Downton Abbey: A New Era
Simon Curtis, PG, 125 min
HHHH
10 1 May 2022