Review of Downton Abbey (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

I forgot how delightful it is to dive into a television show nine years too late and have absolutely no idea of anyone’s name. The last time I did this was watching Serenity with my dad without having any knowledge of the Firefly series and I remember loving how novel it felt to not have the set up to a sequel for a sci-fi film. This movie doesn’t give a **** if you know who anyone is, and it’s not about to explain **** so you spend most of the first twenty minutes playing detective to figure out who’s new and essential and who’s an artifice of the film’s storyline.

Downton Abbey the show seems like it required like 18 characters for the plot to move, because there are actually two casts, the nobles and the staff. In Downton Abbey the movie, we need like 30 characters so that everyone has a rival, so to some extent it feels like a very, very fancy hall of mirrors.

The best, most exciting plot (twist) is the one that the story spends the least amount of time on (the Irish guy’s allegiance)–Wife says. Most of the husband characters are pretty incidental, some of them don’t even bother showing up until the final scene of the film. I’m not sure if that’s how the show also dealt with having a cast that was bursting at the scenes, if they just spent most of their time off stage until the final showstopper or if there was legitimately too much plot to cover. None of the food looks appetizing. Because there are so many plates to keep spinning at any given time, there’s not really much time to devote to any single story before you have to toggle back to the wait staff or to the butler’s side quest. But I actually think that made for some interesting self-imposed storytelling limitations, because it necessitates a lot of these large ballroom scenes where the sound shifts in and out of different dinner party conversations in a single shot, or the transferring of the plot baton from one character to another through a single shot in the style of Birdman.

SNL did a lovely job of cutting the movie to the quick by preying on its low stakes. Essentially the waitstaff’s conflict is that they have three days off but they want to work, which comes off as a little “dewy-eyed” (Wife’s term for their relationship with the system of landed aristocracy). For the noble family, there’s some shenanigans with a faraway manor that’s not entirely connected to Downton at all that seems only tangentially related to the aspirations of any of the children, but “gives Maggie Smith something to do,” as Wife put it. Maggie Smith, by the way, is the OG of this movie, except her ending is unnecessarily schmaltzy. If you’re looking for another movie where old people embrace being old but not being dead, maybe try Ian McKellan’s surprisingly awesome update to the Sherlock Holmes’s stories:

Wife was meh on the movie after having followed the series for years and dragging me to it, but I was enamored. Maybe worth it if you are going in cold rather than if you have any “advantage or disadvantage of prior acquaintance,” as Tennessee Williams put it.