Downton Abbey:  the Grand Finale  (PG) |Close-Up Film Review

“Grand Finale” eh?  Or is it?   In this one the Crawley family, staff and friends are about to embark on the 1930s.  Surely the franchise will not be able to resist the next chapter –  Downton Abbey: The War years?  We will see.

Meanwhile after six series and two earlier films the family – or most of them – are still there, as are most of their staff.  But of course they and we are missing the gimlet eye and acid tongue of Lady Violet (the late Maggie Smith).  Though there’s a rather grim portrait of her dominating the great hall to reassure us she is not forgotten.

Possibly she’s disapproving of the scandal caused by Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) who is divorcing her second husband.  You can’t blame her.  Hubby Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) was absent from the last film – away with his racing cars indeed –  the real reason being actor Matthew Goode was not available.  Making a virtue of necessity however writer Julian Fellowes has turned it into a scandal, as it would have been at the time.   Near the beginning of the film Lady Mary is quite brutally ejected from a posh party because a member the royal family is about to arrive and a divorcee in the ensemble would never do.

However very soon Lady Grantham’s cousin Harold from America turns up, played by Paul Giamatti, bringing with  him his financial advisor Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola) who swiftly takes a fancy to Lady Mary.  But can he be trusted?   You know what these American money merchant types are like. 

Meanwhile the action continues downstairs.  Mr Carson (Jim Carter), while now retired and married to the former Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) still cannot resist telling the young ones how things should be.   While above stairs the always worried looking Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) is also having retirement issues over his impending handover of the estate to Lady Mary.  Pretty revolutionary for the time but with no male heir to be found, what’s an aristocrat to do to keep the home fires burning as it were?

It all started back in 2001 when American film maker Robert Altman hired writer Julian Fellowes as the resident posh families expert to work on Gosford Park, a rather good country house party murder mystery with a good helping of social comment, particularly with regard to the servant classes.   After which those telly chaps saw a potential successor to the much loved Upstairs Downstairs which run for four series in the 1970s.  

Downton has actually chalked up a total of six series and three films over 15 years, covering social history, events and the British class system from the sinking of the Titanic up until Noel Coward (Arty Froushan) and his 1929 hit Bitter Sweet.  Like Ivor Novello in Gosford Park, Coward is invited in this one as an honoured guest after the family and the whole staff enjoy an outing to Noel’s show  – a bizarrely unlikely treat, which opens the film.  In a nod to class tradition, the family are in the expensive seats and the staff in the gods.

We British do like to rewrite our social history though, don’t we, looking back misty eyed at the good old days, when everyone knew their place and the paternal gentry looked after their social inferiors?  Not totally accurate but perhaps understandably. 

It is however a bit of a fairy tale and though Downton, while noting some of history’s conflicts may not be classic drama about the human condition, it does provide a reassuring escape from the moral complexities of the modern world.

Which leads me to believe that either it will be back or something just as reassuring will emerge to take its place.