Downton Abbey: A New Era is a sickly-sweet step too far
There are many criticisms you can level at Downton Abbey. Its quixotic, blindingly white vision of British history. Its rosy-tinted lens on the aristocracy. The fact some would say it has besmirched the CV of the great Maggie Smith. But the main problem with Downton Abbey: A New Era, Julian Fellowes’s second big screen spin-off about the lives and loves of interwar aristocrats the Crawley family? It is almost offensively gentle.
We pick up from where the first, 2019 film left off, with the picturesque wedding between socialist-chauffeur-turned-conflicted-posh-person Tom Branson (Allen Leech) and his new love interest Lucy (Tuppence Middleton). Further excitement is in store as some of the family are obliged to take a jaunt to the South of France when an old flame of Maggie Smith’s irrepressible Dowager Countess leaves her a villa in his will.
The second strand of the story is set much closer to home, at Downton itself, as – in a bid to raise the cash needed to keep the house from disrepair – the family opens their home to a film crew when a production company gets in touch asking to use Downton as a filming location.
Both storylines meander along enjoyably enough. The South of France yields plenty of chances for Jim Carter’s delightfully curmudgeonly butler Carson to complain about the French and extol the virtues of talking “loudly and slowly to foreigners”. But it isn’t just the unfamiliar terrain that is unnerving. When Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) realises that the “idyllic interlude” his mother enjoyed with the owner of the villa took place around – uh oh! – nine months before he was born, he is thrown into doubt about who his father was. Could he be, God forbid, a “Frenchman’s bastard”?
There’s trouble in paradise elsewhere, too. Mary (Michelle Dockery) admits that her absent husband Tony seems to have chosen his passion for car racing over her, as she grows closer to the dishy director of the film that is being shot at Downton. And other characters are facing serious battles with their health.
Yet despite a glut of emotional material, the film is curiously unmoving – even in scenes so momentously sad on paper they would have destroyed a nation’s Christmas were this a seasonal special.
The script is lively and witty, and there are occasional instances of poignant insight about ageing, such as when the Dowager describes her youth now as feeling as distant as “another planet”. But while Downton has always been a comfort watch, it has consistently revelled in its ability to make us cry one minute, and laugh the next. In stark contrast, A New Era seems frightened to make audiences feel anything at all. Big romantic gestures contain only the thinnest sliver of passion while tragic moments are quickly neutralised with frothy comedy.
It’s an undoubtedly cheerful and entertaining couple of hours, but at the same time so saccharine it makes the series itself look like a spikily satirical masterpiece. Which, even the most die-hard fans will admit, is saying something.
Downton Abbey: A New Era is in cinemas on 29 April