Review: With the exception of Lady Mary’s conspicuously absent husband, everyone and everything arrives right on schedule in “Downton Abbey: A New Era.”
though that film had the benefit of a sharper class angle and a director skilled enough to hold humanism and cynicism in perfect balance. Next to both “Gosford Park” and the “Downton Abbey” series, the two “Downton” movies feel both graceless and superfluous, partly because they’re structured — seemingly by necessity, though more out of laziness — around some Very Special Surprise Guests who conveniently throw the entire household into disarray.
Perhaps a third movie in the “Downton Abbey” franchise, if ever it happens, could savor the delicious spectacle of the Crawleys being unceremoniously kicked out of their own precious country pile. This one, written by Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis with the same workmanlike efficiency, affords its share of passing pleasures.
A better, gutsier movie might have explored that romantic possibility rather than merely teasing it; it would have also allowed Barrow, one of the series’ most gratifyingly complex characters, to do more than just pine and mope. But then the show, whatever its flaws, had the time and inclination to explore the inner lives of its downstairs characters; the movie, struggling to squeeze a massive ensemble into a two-hour story, renders the help more dramatically subservient than ever.
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