Downton Abbey's very fond farewell

 

  There are at least two ways of looking at Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, the culmination of two previous big-screen efforts to repackage the long-running TV series for multiplex audiences. Six seasons on PBS encompassing 52 episodes evidently weren't enough to sate the appetites of those who like their soap operas burnished with caustic wit and class differences as manifested in the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who toil on their behalf.

  Never my cup of tea, Downton Abbey nonetheless accumulated legions of fans under the guidance of Julian Fellowes, a writer who developed Downton Abbey as an outgrowth of Gosford Park, another series that ran on PBS.

   The late Maggie Smith appeared in both series and in Downton movies as the beloved Dowager Countess Violet Crawley, whose wit sometimes curdled into sarcasm. Fair to say, Smith became the face of Downton Abbey.

   Although Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale leaves the door ajar for the series to continue beyond the 1930s, it serves as a farewell tour for its characters, themes, and, most importantly, grand appointments in set decoration, costumes, ladies' hats, and fine jewelry.

    About those two ways of seeing The Grand Finale: 

    First, Grand Finale can be regarded as the fondest of possible farewells for beloved characters and the actors who play them, a major helping of well-crafted fan service designed to ease devotees into a Downtonless future.

   If you’re in this group, you may wish to stop reading here because I'm about to shift gears.

    Let's pause for a bit of business, though: The roster of Downton actors includes: Hugh Bonneville as the Earl of Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern, as his countess wife, Cora, Michelle Dockery, as Lady Mary Crawley, Laura Carmichael, as Lady Edith Crawley, Charles Carson as Mr. Carter, the butler, Sophie McShera, as Daisy Mason, a kitchen worker en route to becoming head cook, and on and on and on through a teeming roster of roles.

    Paul Giamatti has been added to the latest edition as Harold Levinson, Lady Grantham's wayward American brother. Another newcomer, Arty Froushan, appears as Noel Coward. Alessandro Nivola plays Gus Sambrook, the self-proclaimed genius entrepreneur who helped Levinson squander a good deal of the family fortune.

    For the record, Dominic West reprises his role as Guy Dexter, the smiling film star who worked his way into the previous film.

    Now, about the second way of regarding The Grand Finale. Fond farewell? Yes. But this example of fondness easily and often becomes saccharine, sentimental schmaltz decked out in top hats and formal ware. 

   The movie also is marked by gently presented social conflict. Winds of social change are rocking Britain: the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of the middle class, long-standing convention abrading against modern attitudes, and the emergence of Lady Mary as an independent woman.

    No sooner does Grand Finale open than Lady Mary’s recent divorce turns her into a social pariah who eventually must be reabsorbed into the fabric of Yorkshire life.

   The family also brushes against the shady money ethos represented by Sambrook's Americanism, greed dressed up in an attempt to become part of the aristocratic wallpaper.

   All of this is accompanied be emergence of a new form of status: celebrity. Coward's reputation as a playwright and actor, trumps (you'll pardon the expression) nobility; he ignites the enthusiasms of both the rich and of their loyal servants.

    All of these conflicts are stated obviously and each is resolved without too much ruffling of anyone's ascot; i.e., the script leaves no loose ends dangling, politely closing the book on every potentially fraught page it opens. Rather than gathering force, the winds of change flutter like a soft breeze.

   The movie even borrows a line from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Upon confronting the London apartment that will replace the grand London house the family sells to meet expenses, Lord Grantham coos,  "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." 

   Giamatti and Nivola stand out like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw. Maybe that's the point. Americans don't easily fit into a world built for anglophiles.

   And with 49 credited roles in Grand Finale, it's a small miracle that director Simon Curtis saves Fellowes' screenplay from hopeless confusion.

     Even for those of us who aren’t enthusiasts, there are pleasures to be found in watching horses race over beautifully tended green downs or in the familiarity of the Grantham home. Anna Robins' costumes underscore the series' ongoing  commitment to pleasing the eye.

     Moreover,  Dockery gives the movie the spine it needs without making too much fuss about it.

    And, yes, the movie finds ways to honor the late Smith for her role in the series. Of course, it does.

    Make of it what you will, but for me, the whole Downton business ended with neither a bang nor a whimper, but, if you will, with a sigh. This lavishly appointed addendum gracefully drifts into the soft embrace of a cultural comfort zone.

 

   

   

   

Another trip to 'Downton Abbey'

 

 As a beloved TV series, Downton Abbey sustained six seasons worth of interest by allowing characters to develop as they faced new challenges, a socially unacceptable romance or the waning of rigid class distinctions. 

  Then there were the costumes and luxurious trappings of Britain in the 1920s, not to mention the contrast between the servants and those who dwelled above them.

   As a movie franchise, Downton Abbey is another matter, often reducing its appeal to costumes, previously developed affection for some of the major characters, plush settings, and, most reliably, Maggie Smith’s bite as the indomitable Violet Crawley.

   Downton Abbey: A New Era arrives in theaters as another helping of British comfort food; the movie ties up more loose ends and introduces two new elements. A journey to France (Lady Crawley inherits a villa in Southern France from a long-ago admirer) and a film crew descends on hallowed Downton Abbey grounds.

   The film's director (Hugh Dancy) deems the estate a great location to make a silent film about a gambler and the woman who loves him. Actors at Downton Abbey? Scandalous. 

   As the actors playing the stars of the film within the film, Dominic West and Laura Haddock stake a claim for a movie of their own, even if a joke involving the difficulty of transferring  Haddock’s character's lower-class accent to talkies isn’t entirely fresh.

   The trip to France adds a question that torments Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) but struck me as a heavily underlined reminder of Robert’s intractable Englishness.

    By now, Mary (Michelle Dockery) has taken over the estate. She agrees to allow the film crew to trample through the great house because she needs money to repair the leaky roof, an obvious sign that the rudiments of the old order are falling prey to wear.

   It doesn’t help the film that Robert Crawley, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) the butler who defends the old ways, and others are shipped off to France, leaving the movie to seesaw between countries and making room for an appearance by Nathalie Baye as the irritated widow of the man who left Lady Crawley his villa.

    Predictable and committed to swaddling fans in Downton trappings, this helping of the series seems to have lost touch with the need for sharply honed conflict. Even Smith's barbs seem to have lost some of their sting.

   Any movie with legions of devotees presents a challenge for reviewers. For some, another encounter with familiar characters from the servant and upper-crust crowds will be sufficient. 

   Though frayed around the edges, the plush Downton environment still offers undeniable voyeuristic pleasures.

    And, of course, the actors know how to sell this material, even in the smaller roles. Kevin Doyle, for example, has a brief but sharp turn as Mr. Mosley a teacher who discovers his true calling as a screenwriter after the silent production loses its funding and must convert to a talkie. 

    The movie’s biggest development can’t be discussed without spoilers but it passes like a sigh, more a self-reflexive tribute to the heart of Downton than an emotional peak. 

     No point quibbling. If you're not a fan, you needn't bother. If you are, nothing I say likely will deter you.

     Writer Julian Fellowes, the creative force behind the Downton series, and director Simon Curtis give A New Era the feel of a well-upholstered chair into which even the less-than-enthusiastic among us (that would be me) gracefully can sink while being lulled into untroubled acceptance.

    

'Monuments Men' misses the mark

Intriguing subject short-changed in Clooney-directed movie.

In his sixth directorial effort, George Clooney has made a middle-of-the-road movie about an intriguing subject, the attempt to rescue priceless art seized by the Nazis during World War II.

The Monuments Men of the title are a group of aging academics and art specialists charged with saving paintings, sculpture and monuments from Hitler's rapacious legions. Upper-echelon Nazis wanted to appropriate most of western art for a gargantuan museum to be named after the Fuhrer. Pieces that didn't make it into Hitler's art mausoleum would find their way into the private collections of Nazi bigwigs.

Clooney also stars in the movie: He plays Frank Stokes, an art historian from Harvard's Fogg Museum: Stokes leads the culture-saving effort after assembling his team in what amounts to a subdued Dirty Dozen style.

Matt Damon plays James Granger, an art expert from the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York; Bill Murray portrays architect Richard Campbell; John Goodman appears as a sculptor; Jean Dujardin portrays a French art dealer; and Bob Balaban plays Preston Savitz, a character whose professional skills weren't entirely clear to me. British actor Hugh Bonneville takes on the role of a British art expert who's trying to rehabilitate his reputation as a drunk.

Cate Blanchett has a smaller role as Claire, a French woman who works at a Paris museum, and who has been forced to assist the Nazis in their pilfering. It takes a while for Damon's character to convince Claire, who also has ties to the Resistance, to help find hidden art treasures: She's fearful that the U.S. will appropriate masterpieces in much the same way as the Germans have done.

A couple of major tensions break through the movie's somewhat frozen surface. First, there's an on-going argument about whether any piece of art is worth a human life. That raises additional questions about the importance of culture, even during war-time duress.

Early on, Clooney's Stokes asks President Roosevelt -- a leader for whom art was not a top priority -- what the war will have meant if, at the end of it, Michelangelo's David has been reduced to rubble.

The Monuments Men also race to keep important art objects out of the hands of the advancing Russians, who are portrayed as eager to get their hands on landmarks of Western civilization.

As it turns out, much of the stolen art was hidden in German mines, but the movie's discoveries have a plodding feel. The men's various missions proceed without much vigor.

That seems a major miscalculation: The Monuments Men is like a caper movie -- only without the caper.

The screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslove (based on a book by Robert M. Edsel) makes some attempts at humor, most of it italicized by one of the most disappointing musical scores in recent memory, a shock since it was written by the gifted Alexandre Desplat, whose work I've almost always admired.

The movie attempts to differentiate among the characters in broad ways, but, as depicted here, these are not the most interesting group of people. Moreover, Clooney doesn't find enough ways to demonstrate either the men's passion for art or their expertise.

Ironically, the movie could have benefited from more talk about art. Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges turns up, as does a famous Ghent altar piece, but for a movie about the enduring importance of art, Monuments Men pays too little attention to it.

Oh well, call it a miss by some very talented people: This little-known and clearly fascinating story deserved more than the shrug The Monuments Men induces.