Downton Abbey movie review & film summary (2019)

What do you need to know beyond that? Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is still worried that Downton can't sustain itself in a more frugal time that frowns on grand displays of wealth. (There's a reference to the General Strike of 1926, but only in terms of the inconvenience and crankiness it caused.) A contrivance forces the former butler Carson (Jim Carter) out of retirement to take charge of the estate ahead of the royal visit. There's a subplot about the tension between imperial England and the Northern Irish, represented by Allen Leach's Tom Branson, the former chauffeur, current estate manager, and staunch Irish socialist; and another focusing on Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the repressed gay first footman who later became head valet, under-butler, and finally butler (replacing Carson). 

There's also an inheritance plotline that's mainly an excuse to pit Maggie Smith against another great English character actress, Imelda Staunton. The latter plays Lady Maud Bagshaw, a baroness whose father was the great uncle of Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville). Maud inherited the "Granby Estate", once belonging to the Crawleys, and is thinking about leaving it to her servant, Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton). Scandalous! 

Much has been written about the original TV series—and now its big-screen continuation—asserting that the main appeals are nostalgia for monarchy, rigid class hierarchy, and gross colonial expropriation of resources and wealth. That's correct, insofar as it goes. The Public Broadcasting System made "Downton Abbey" a hit in the United States. That network wouldn't exist without Anglophilia. There is something a tad unsettling (though understandable, in a Freudian way) about the continuing wish to fetishize a onetime mother country that the rebel child rejected 250 years earlier. The entitlement here isn't unexamined, but the storytellers don't exactly turn over rocks to see what bugs might be lurking. Like most stories set among the wealthy in another time, there's a "have it both ways" aspect. The script is thick with criticisms of the rich and the social system that enables them, but if that was what people really wanted to see, they'd be at home watching a film by Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. A movie like this is more about the coaches, the footmen, the waistcoats and bowler hats, and the gleam of silver bells.  

But I'd suggest that there's something else besides wealth porn happening whenever an audience embraces this kind of film in 2019, a year defined by "Avengers: Endgame," "Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker," "Toy Story 4," "Joker," "Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw," and their ilk. Movies like "Downton Abbey" are a different kind of franchise product. And they deliver another definition of action cinema, one that is increasingly ill-served by theatrical films: the opportunity to watch people who are very good at ordinary, non-lethal tasks do those things with skill and imagination, even when they don't feel like it.