An edited
film review by David Wiegand for the S.F. Chronicle.
With
a cast headed by Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern and a delicious Dame
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey is the story of the Crawley family, British nobles
whose dynastic hold on their fortune and the stately mansion of the title is
encumbered by something called an entail. That is a restriction established in
a will that the entire estate of the present Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley
(Bonneville), can only be passed on to his male heir as a package, including
all the money his American-born wife, Cora (McGovern), pumped into the family.
All
of that would be well and good, had the Crawleys begat a son. Instead, Cora
gave birth to three girls: Mary (Michelle
Dockery), Edith (Laura Carmichael)
and Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay).
As the series opens, it's April 1912 and word reaches the Abbey that the
Titanic has sunk, taking with it a cousin and his marriageable son, who was
destined to wed Mary to keep all the money in the family.
Although
Robert's mother, the Dowager Countess Violet (Smith), has never been too keen on
his American wife, she's willing to team up with her to fight the entail by
nudging Mary, the eldest Crawley daughter, toward marriage with a distant
cousin named Matthew (Dan Stevens),
who has the temerity to work for a living (as an attorney) and is proud to be a
member of the middle class. At one point, in conversation with the family, he
mentions having spare time on weekends only, to which Maggie Smith’s Dowager
Countess asks: What is a weekend?
Yes,
writer Julian Fellowes borrows a bit
of this and a bit of that to craft his plot. There's also a touch of Brideshead Revisited, as well as Robert
Altman's Gosford Park, which Fellowes
wrote based on an idea by the director and actor Bob Balaban. And there's a
whole lot of Upstairs, Downstairs: At
least half the story focuses on the help, including the lovable housekeeper,
Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the
stalwart butler and majordomo, Carson (Jim
Carter), and Grantham's old military buddy, John Bates (Brendan Coyle), who is hired as his
friend's valet. While the Crawley family squabbles and frets over the great matter - how to keep the
estate intact - downstairs is full of intrigue as the footman Thomas (Rob James-Collier) conspires with a
lady's maid, O'Brien (Siobhan Finneran),
to get Bates fired.
Actually,
there's quite a bit of ambition among the servants of Downton Abbey. Young Gwen
(Rose Leslie), a farmer's daughter
in service as a maid, is secretly learning to use a typewriter in hopes of
becoming a secretary. Lady's maid Anna (Joanne
Froggatt) has set her cap for the mysteriously reserved Bates. And the poor
kitchen helper, Daisy (Sophie McShera),
is desperate to catch the attention of the coldhearted Thomas, never quite
getting the fact that, as the cook tries to explain it, Thomas is not a ladies' man. Not by half: He's already
tried to blackmail a former boyfriend, an impoverished duke who descends on the
household in hopes of securing Lady Mary's hand in marriage, but quickly exits
once he realizes he won't get a penny of the family money.
It's
inevitable that when you craft a plot that includes not only the kitchen sink
but a host of additional household fixtures, things get a bit hard to believe
here and there. Downton Abbey dips
into out-and-out melodrama at various points, but you barely have time to roll
your eyes before it moves on to yet another subplot.
Fellowes
does a masterful job keeping all these plates spinning at the same time. But
there are a few moments when he sacrifices character consistency for a good
line. McGovern's Cora, for example, seems at one moment to be willing to marry
her daughters off to livestock if it will keep the estate together, and at the
next, is urging Mary to follow her heart. When Mary is caught in a premarital
scandal with a swarthy foreigner, Cora is aghast for about a half second before
turning her focus on how to contain the scandal long enough to get Mary
lucratively wed.
Fellowes
does know how to write some tasty dialogue, especially for Maggie Smith. On the
other hand, Smith could turn the most mundane assemblage of words into aural
poetry. Her Dowager Countess steals every scene she's in with a combination of
tightly pursed sneers, half-lidded glares, undulating eyebrows and rippling
vocalism.
The
other performances are equally winning, but beyond that, you can't help feeling
these actors are having a jolly good time with all this overblown fluff. And so
will you. Downton Abbey runs six
seasons comprising 52 episodes.
Labels:
drama, period, romance, rom-drama-faves, tragedy
IMDb 87/100
MetaScore (critics=80, viewers=82)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=86, viewers=93)
Blu-ray
Netflix
Highclerc Castle (Downton Abbey)
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