British director Simon Curtis rings down the curtain on the venerable historical drama Downton Abbey with a mix of wistfulness and celebration as one generation passes the torch, reluctantly at first, to their successors. Even for one who has not seen a single episode of this show, the story struck notes of warmth and resilience ... much needed these days.
Set during the time of the great market crash at the end of the '20s, "The Grand Finale" opens with a wonderful tracking shot into a London theater where Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet is being performed, its most enduring number -- I'll See You Again -- being reprised at the close of the last act. The camera pans over the audience -- the peers and aristocrats in their boxes, the commoners in the balcony. All in keeping with British tradition.
In the first few minutes, we are (re)introduced to the main players in Downton's world of class and privilege -- principally Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery), the elder daughter of Lord and Lady Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), the master and mistress of the eponymous estate outside of London, a large property that is struggling financially. Mary, a sharp and decisive woman, is heir apparent to the Grantham legacy but is facing her own personal challenges.
News of Lady Mary's divorce hits the London papers, and she becomes a social pariah, invitations to Grantham parties are declined. Other intrigues unfold as Lady Grantham, American born, welcomes her luckless brother (Paul Giamatti) from the States with troubling news about their family's fortune. He is accompanied by an oily friend, Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), who has been managing the family's accounts, and who presses the wounded Lady Mary into an intimate encounter.
That is a broad outline of the "upstairs" happenings. Changes are also underway "downstairs," in the kitchen and servants' quarters, where the veterans are preparing to take their leave and retire to what is presumed to be a life of well-earned ease. Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is leaving the kitchen in the hands of Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), a young woman she's thought of as a daughter. Jim Carter's Mr. Carson, the senior butler at Downton, is having a bit more difficulty loosening his grip on a post he's held for decades, but his successor Andy Parker, husband to Daisy, shows great deference and forbearance, even as news of the uncertainty about the house's future filters from above.
The film is about the rigidity of class differences in England, but, I think, it is also about how porous those distinctions were becoming. The relationship between Mary and her maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggat) is one of the richest and more complex. Mary's reliance on the other woman's support and discretion represents the upper class's long-standing (eternal?) dependence on the working class to give their lives form and structure, recognizing (though not verbally expressing) their deep incapability. This is reflected most pithily in a brief exchange when Grantham tells Carson to tie his bowtie for him as he prepares for a public appearance to which the butler is not invited. (Though I spotted only one person of color in the entire picture, the film's message easily translates to America's history with race and class.)
Grace notes on this theme are added when the trio of actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West), his companion and former Downton servant Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Colllier), and Coward (Arty Froushan) are invited to a Grantham affair where all manner of social convention are teased and in the end capsulized by Coward's performance of Poor Little Rich Girl for Lady Mary and the other guests.
At the time, it would have been a huge "FU" to those who were in a twist about propriety and status, and it has a savory deliciousness even today.
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