Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale review: A bland, boring end to an 'insidiously silly series'
Any hint of pulse-racing drama is swiftly nipped in the bud in this conclusion to the Downton saga, writes Alistair Harkness
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG) ★★
No sooner had the Downton Abbey franchise promised a New Era with its previous instalment, along comes Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale to burn the whole enterprise to the ground with a plot that sees the international repercussions of the 1929 Wall Street crash plunge the Crawley family into poverty and their titular home into a state of disrepair.
Okay, not really. Though the stock market crash does feature in a plot strand involving Elizabeth McGovern’s Lady Grantham and her New York-based brother Harold (Paul Giamatti), as with everything else in Julian Fellowes’ aggressively pleasant creation, any potential disruption is swiftly resolved so as not to risk imbuing this insidiously silly series with too much in the way of pulse-racing drama.
Indeed, the closest it gets is the gasp of shock that greets the public reveal that Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is now a divorcee, something Fellowes and director Simon Curtis use as the catalyst for an episodic plot in which Lady Mary’s mildly controversial re-entry into society provides some over-arching narrative glue.
With the late Maggie Smith’s recently deceased Dowager Countess inspiring a gentle existential crisis in the Crawley clan as a whole (Hugh Bonneville’s sniffy Lord Grantham spends most of the film fretting about when to pass Downton on to the next generation), the movie jumps between the family’s privileged life in London and their privileged life in the country, finding ever more patronising ways to include the Crawley’s salt-of-the-earth servants as societal changes bring about minor bouts of downsizing that in no way look as if they’ll materially affect this particular branch of the aristocracy.
Those who love Downton, though, will be delighted to hear that Fellowes has written Noël Coward into the plot (he’s played by Arty Froushan), and that the whole thing builds to an uneventful village fête and a moment of reflection in which the ghosts of Downton past (oh, hi Dan Stevens!) appear in a montage of clips from the TV show.
The agnostic, meanwhile, can go back to pondering the puzzling appeal of a phenomenon predicated on giving us a glimpse into such a bland and boring world.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.