Its title promises that 15 years after Downton Abbey first became the last great long-running British TV drama of the pre-streaming era and a decade since it finished on television only to encore with three spin-off movies, at last the franchise has run its course. Huzzah.
To say Grand Finale is the best of the Downton Abbey movies is not a very high bar to clear. It’s also one that feels most like the TV shows, though writer-creator Julian Fellowes has added some clever-clogs flourishes.
This film comes with the absence of Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess who died at the end of the previous film. A portrait of Violet now glowers over the vestibule of Downton Abbey, and I’m not sure the artist got her good side.
But this starts not at the Yorkshire stately home but in London’s West End in the summer of 1930. An impressive sweeping shot finds the Crawley family and their servants all attending a performance of Noël Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet. The camera gets to the stage on the last song, so, yes, Grand Finale even begins with a curtain call. Coward himself, played by the excellently named Arty Froushan, becomes a celebrity guest at Downton, where he gets the inspiration for his next hit, Private Lives, from the travails of Lady Mary, whose divorce from Henry Talbot has just come through, and which makes her a woman scorned by London society.
Elsewhere, when Harold Levinson (Paul Giamatti), the American brother of Lady Grantham, comes to stay, bringing with him his dubious financial adviser, Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), and bad news about the family fortune, he gets a book from the Downton library. It’s The Pickwick Papers, the Charles Dickens tale with a main character who is easily taken in by con men. He falls asleep before he can finish it.
There are other reasons this movie is a little more satisfying than its previous efforts. For one thing, the frocks. Both Michelle Dockery’s Mary and Laura Carmichael’s Edith wear some scene stealers. And second, this comes with a story that follows two films where everybody kept reminding each other that the times were changing. This might be first of the Downton big-screen trilogy that actually shows things have. Not that the Downton staff are exactly up in arms. Fellowes’s franchise has always been about the good old days when people knew their place and social upheavals existed only in foreign lands.
It’s all weighed down by many scenes of two characters on chesterfields having meaningful heart to hearts about how much they’ve meant to each other. That can make this feel like a very long goodbye. But 15 years after we first followed the first of the Earl of Grantham’s labradors across the lawn to the abbey in the opening credits, this finishes with another coming the other way with his departing owners. It’s a nice canine bookend to a touching last hurrah.
Rating out of five: ★★★½
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, directed by Simon Curtis, is in cinemas now.
