The decline of Downton

This weekend, the cinematic event of the year is released. Ad Astra? Joker? Little Women? Wrong on all counts, alas. We have, for our collective sins as a nation, Downton Abbey: The Movie. We are to be treated to a feature-length account of the upstairs and downstairs travails of the Grantham family, in which we shall find out about the events and vicissitudes of their romantic and personal lives, complete with much heavy-handed humour and occasional picturesque shots of Highclere Castle. The major event that the film revolves around is the visit of George V and Queen Mary to Downton, something treated with the gushing reverence that one might expect from its lordly scriptwriter Julian Fellowes. It is, on balance, enough to make one become a Marxist.

Early reviews of the Downton Abbey film have not been bad, so much as bemused. The common complaint is that there is nothing especially cinematic about it, but that it is instead a feature-length episode of the programme, with slightly higher production values. Even the excitement of being able to see Jim Carter’s Carson – comfortably the programme’s greatest creation, and the best acted to boot – in full widescreen splendour, and hear his ponderous pomposity in full Dolby THX sound cannot justify the ever-increasing cost of a cinema ticket for the average family. Yet seldom has a film been so precisely engineered for two specific markets: those who attend weekday matinees at which tea and biscuits are served, and Americans.

The cult following that Downton enjoys in America is not hard to understand. It offers a weirdly idyllic view of an early twentieth century England in which everyone knows their place, where the incursions of the modern world are reluctantly tolerated but also set aside, and where personal and national tragedy is mourned, briefly, and then forgotten. The character of Lord Grantham, played with wooden heartiness by Hugh Bonneville, is the epitome of English values, despite the odd lapse, such as an attraction to a parlour maid or a spectacular moment where he vomits blood across the dinner table. His wife Cora, essayed by Elizabeth McGovern with an expression of strained sympathy, is an American, and given to occasional murmurs. And then there are many others, of varying degrees of interest. There have been guest appearances by Shirley MacLaine and (bizarrely) Paul Giamatti. I expect the film to do very, very well commercially in the United States. It would probably do even better if it were to be marketed with the subtitle “When Britain was Great”.

The disappointment of Downton is that, when it began in 2010, it was extremely good. Wherever one stood on the film that inspired it, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, it proved that Fellowes was a witty and acute chronicler of both upper and lower class milieus, and that he could write superbly cutting dialogue, especially when it came to Maggie Smith. Expectations were therefore high, particularly as it represented something of a gamble by ITV to move into the field of big-budget costume drama that had hitherto been the preserve of the BBC. Yet it was greeted with utter rapture, and rightly so. It worked for two distinct reasons. The first was that it was unafraid to shy away from the unpleasant and the grubby; aristocratic sisters stab one another in the back and ruin their marital prospects, a ladies’ maid causes her employer to have a miscarriage and Lord Grantham’s valet Mr Bates is much connived against. And the second was that Fellowes managed to give his complex, interesting characters memorable lines. When Maggie Smith’s querulous Dowager Countess asked, in surprise, “What is a weekend?”, she gave British television one of its most quotable moments.

Sadly, the excellence of the first series didn’t last, and it is almost certainly because Fellowes eschewed the American-style writers’ room format and wrote everything himself. With the series returning on an annual basis, the scripts felt rushed and formulaic, to say nothing of unbelievable. When a storyline did work dramatically – such as the rape of Bates’s wife Anna, played with an intensity and conviction by Joanna Froggatt that felt at odds with the pantomime clowning of many of her co-stars – it ended up being muffed in unclear plotting and repetition. Often, one saw a more interesting mirror plot developing (the idea of the noble, wronged Bates as a double murderer, but having committed both murders for the highest possible ideals) which was then not followed up. One wonders whether Fellowes had a contract that allowed him not to take notes or advice from his producers; by the pitiful final series, most people were weary of the romantic shenanigans of Lady Mary and Lady Edith, and only the odd outrageous moment of camp humour, courtesy of the likes of Molesley and Spratt, kept it watchable.

Thus, the film arrives to a general audience who may, or may not, be willing to indulge Fellowes and his characters for a further two hours. Early reports of scenes set in a Twenties Northern equivalent of a San Francisco bathhouse, in which the unhappily gay Thomas Barrow finds liberation, promise the delirious silliness that viewers have long enjoyed, and the addition of David Haig as the royal butler and Imelda Staunton as Lady Maud will at least bring a couple of high-class thespians to the film, but one has to question why anyone bothered making it. Then one hears a whisper in one’s ear. “Box office, dear boy, box office.” And that is all the raison d’être that one needs, apparently.