Oh my frips and twilligers, is Downton Abbey finally done for? It’s right there in the title Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), which is the third film to follow the highly successful TV series, about a blueblood English family’s numerous and incredibly mild dramatic foibles, that ran from 2010-2015. OK, their foibles aren’t always “incredibly mild” – Maggie Smith’s character, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, passed away at the end of 2022’s A New Era, precluding the death of the actress herself in 2024. But she looms large in The Grand Finale as a grand guignolesque portrait of her hangs prominently in Downton Abbey, prompting us to deliver our own withering one-liners as various Crawley family members natter and fuff over whether Lord Grantham should retire and let someone else manage the estate. It’s a fitting end to the franchise and, as ever, leaves us asserting that these people are very nice and all that, but they need to get some damn JOBS.
The Gist: It’s 1930, and the Crawleys are in London staying at their less gigantic mansion, Grantham House. It’s “London season” for them, and being driven around for food and entertainment just wears them out. They attend the play Bitter Sweet by Noel Coward (Arty Froushan), and even get to meet the playwright after the show, and reunite with one of its stars, A New Era character Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who’s totally gay-dating former Downton servant Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), a fact that they refer to as “traveling a lot together.” This is how these people speak – like the truth is a monument and their speech is a path encircling it. That is, until it comes to divorce, of which Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is the subject. She and her lousy hubs are dunzoes, which is such a monumental occurrence in this world, you’d think J. Robert Oppenheimer invented it. As soon as the hosts of a fancy party find out about it, they remove Lady Mary from the premises, but not until the Crawley family is forced to hide under the steps so the Royals in attendance aren’t in the same building as a divorced woman. WELL I NEVER.
While Robert, a.k.a. Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), and his wife Cora, Countess of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) head back to Downton Abbey in Yorkshire, their daughter Mary endures all the local newspaper headlines about her SCANDALOUS divorce, and stays behind to welcome Cora’s brother Harold (Paul Giamatti) when he arrives from New York. Harold, who’s been handling the Crawleys’ financial investments, has a business buddy in tow, Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), a surprise guest with a used-car-salesman shyster smile. Gus has a few cocktails with Lady Mary and next thing you know, they wake up next to each other in states of undress. Not that we see anything, mind you. It’s bad enough that these people acknowledge the very existence of sex, not to mention – oh my stars and garters – having it outside of marriage and right after getting a divorce, which is like putting a silk-lined top hat on top of another silk-lined top hat. Who sez being a socialite is easy?
As Mary, Harold and Gus arrive at Downton Abbey, things happen that require much heavily mannered discussion. Let’s start with the upstairs: Mary’s younger sister Edith Pelham (Laura Carmichael) invites neighbors and friends to a party, but they all decline because the rules of socialite engagement don’t allow them to associate with divorcees. Lord Grantham ponders whether he should give up the reins to the estate to Mary, and retire to Dower House with Cora, now that the Dowager is dead and the place is empty. As for downstairs, longtime butler and head of the servant staff Charles Carson (Jim Carter) is retiring somewhat reluctantly, to be replaced by Mr. Parker (Michael Fox). And Daisy (Sophie McShera) will take over as head cook, replacing the elderly Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) who, after working there for 50 years, apparently will finally lose her virginity? No, really. She has a conversation about it and everything, but only in certain terms, of course.
And a major existential threat to the Crawleys looms when Harold reveals that the family’s investments are kaputskies, leaving them wondering how they’ll afford to maintain 800 million square feet of mansion and the countless soccer-pitch-sized parcels surrounding it. Mary has some ideas, including selling Grantham House and replacing it with an apartment. Yes, an APARTMENT. She takes her father to visit one and he puzzles over an inability to go “up” to bed in a home that’s but a single floor. He hears footsteps above and below them, footsteps belonging to other families. “How peculiar,” he mutters, trying to wrap his long-bubbled head around the mere concept of an apartment building. “A sort of layer cake of strangers.” The horror. The horror.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Every time I hear the words “Downton Abbey” it makes me want to watch A Room with a View and wistfully recall my peak English-major Merchant Ivory worship.
Performance Worth Watching: In the battle for Most Buttoned-Down Performance, everyone wins! Participation trophies all around! Although it’s rather surreal to see Giamatti never lose his cool and bellow something profane.
Memorable Dialogue: Harold struggles to penetrate a novel out of the Downton Abbey library:
Harold: Is there a murder-mystery I could read? Agatha Christie, something like that?
Mr. Parker: There might be some in the nursery.
Sex and Skin: One discussion of “it,” and one morning after “it,” but we see none of “it” because “it” is never discussed in polite company, and if Downton Abbey is about anything at all, it’s polite company.
Our Take: Change! Progress! How utterly TERRIFYING. Near the end of the film, Harold says, “Sometimes I feel like the past is a more comfortable place than the future,” which is essentially the film’s thesis, as the Crawleys and their servants work through the awkward transitions of power within the house, the retirements and promotions mirroring each other upstairs and downstairs, the elders looking bittersweetly at what was and the youngers dreaming with hope of new and exciting things to come. The film concludes with Lady Mary, the newly appointed figurehead of Downton Abbey, seeing ghosts dancing and laughing in the manor’s halls, and you can’t help but think of lovely days gone by and hopefully lovely days to come and also that DEATH COMES FOR US ALL.
I kid. Fans of this franchise may squeeze out a tear or two with the apparent conclusion of a now long-in-the-tooth saga, saying goodbye to characters who seem like old friends. (A continuation isn’t at all infeasible, with Lady Mary overseeing a new era of fancy dinners and idle dillydally, although the pending rise of fascism in Europe might make the subject matter too dark and heavy for featherweight Downton drama.) Of course, creator Julian Fellowes has arranged his dramatic chesspieces for gentle ridicule of this lifestyle – Lord Grantham’s confusion over the existence of apartments? A socialite’s divorce making the front page of the London newspaper? C’mon now – playing the scenario for subtle comedy. How could he not? He presents the hand-wringing over the Crawleys’ potential inability to maintain their lives of LEH-zure satirically, because if he took it too seriously as a portrait of gross privilege, either its endearingly mushy edges would harden, or critics would nuke the entire enterprise from orbit.
So one more go-round in the gardens and draw-ring rooms of Downton Abbey will play as comfort food for series lifers who’ll inevitably appreciate how director Simon Curtis (notably McGovern’s husband) upends the slo-mo-walk-away-from-explosions shot from action movies by putting his characters in fancy garb to slo-mo walk across the grounds to a horse race, smiling and laughing as they lollygag through a lovely day of genteel sport. Tension? Suspense? Nay. Social breakthrough does occur as Mary’s loved ones truly understand the all-too-human reasons for her divorce, especially now that they’re close to the phenomenon and not judging from afar, and when a former servant joins the Crawleys for dinner upstairs. These things are accepted as truth now, an erosion of old values so they may be replaced by new, mostly better ones. The past may be more comfortable, but it’s never coming back, so you might as well take cues from the Downtoners and just roll with it.
Our Call: The Grand Finale doesn’t offer big booming fireworks, but the little pops and poots reverberate in every wall of the manor. As ever. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.