“Like a hot water bottle on a cold night”, “Downton Abbey” has “long been a great comfort to us Brits”, said Dulcie Pearce in The Sun.
In the first episode of the TV drama, in 2010, the aristocratic Crawley family learnt about the sinking of the “Titanic”; then, over six series and two feature films, we followed them and their servants through the First World War and the influenza pandemic. Now, it is time to say goodbye.
This final film opens in London in 1930, where Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) has scandalised polite society by divorcing her husband; then her American uncle (Paul Giamatti) arrives at Downton with a slimy friend (Alessandro Nivola) to confess that he has lost the family fortune in bad business deals. Of course, the Dowager Countess (played so memorably by the late Maggie Smith) is gone; but we are reminded of her via lingering shots of a huge portrait in the hall.
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Other things, however, are reassuringly familiar, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Elizabeth McGovern “still simpers her lines”, as Lady Grantham, instead of speaking them. “Mr Barrow’s personality transplant remains firmly in place.” And Mr Carson, though retired, is still fussing over the cutlery. As for the plot, well there isn’t a proper one; instead, we have multiple storylines: Mr Molesley has written a film; Noël Coward turns up, with a plan to use Lady Mary’s divorce as the basis for a play; Mrs Carson is running the village fair.
The plodding script is too reliant on characters walking into rooms to announce plot points, said India Block in London's The Standard; the film is almost hypnotically dull; and it grips ever tighter to its deeply conservative vision of a rosy past “that never was”. Still, fans will no doubt relish this chance for a final wallow in Julian Fellowes’s warm bath.
