“The Old Guard Gracefully Steps Back”
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What You Need To Know:
DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE has many characters. So, it helps if you know something about the series and the two previous movies and their stories and characters. That said, THE GRAND FINALE is thoroughly engaging and moving, and sometimes even profound. It has a strong morally uplifting, conservative and traditional worldview that extols duty, service, family, respect for the past, and compassion and hospitality for other people. However, DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE has an implied bedroom scene, brief foul language, and light, brief, implied references to a homosexual relationship. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for teenagers and adults
Content:
Movie has a strong moral, uplifting worldview overall extolling duty, respect for the past, service, family, compassion, and hospitality for other people even when they fall, and respect between master and servant, with a generally positive view of England in 1930, but there are some light Romantic philosophical and cultural notions about social change that sometimes promote the idea that Western society in the past became too restrictive and should have been more tolerant of things like divorce and homosexuality, with light, brief and implied references to a homosexual relationship, plus a socialist woman lightly, in a friendly and comical way, teases a servant she respects, who’s a conservative man, about a particular social issue (the joke is that he better be careful because he’s starting to sound like a socialist on the issue);
No obscenities and three light MG profanities;
No depicted violence, but a man threatens a con man if he ever hurts a woman the first man respects highly;
Implied fornication in two scenes linked together, and it’s implied that an actor and his wardrobe man have a secret homosexual relationship (there’s some brief humor where a conservative man who knows both men misunderstands their relationship, and the two men are friends with the famous British playwright, songwriter, author, and actor Noël Coward, a patriotic Englishman who was secretly a homosexual (Coward becomes friendly with the family that owns the estate in the movie and the two homosexual men previously worked on the estate), but there’s no overt homosexual activity between the men, and the movie makes no reference to Coward’s private life, so viewers unfamiliar with Coward’s complete biography would not necessarily make that connection (also, some or many viewers might not even know who Coward is or was and how important an international figure he became in the 20th Century), plus a socialist woman off-handedly, in a friendly manner, mocks a conservative man’s anger about a minor social injustice (the woman is having a feud with an even more conservative fellow, and the movie sides with her feud);
Upper male nudity in a scene of implied fornication as two unmarried people wake up in bed together;
Alcohol use in several scenes and one scene depicts some light drunkenness where unmarried man seduces woman whose husband recently divorced her;
Brief smoking; and,
A con man has cheated a rich man and his family out of lots of money.
More Detail:
DOWNTON ABBEY ran on PBS in the United States from 2011 to 2016. The series takes the Crawley family and their servants from the sinking of the Titanic in 2012 through World War I, the Spanish flu epidemic after the war, the Irish War for Independence, the British general election of 1923, references to the Teapot Dome Scandal that affects an American uncle and to Hitler’s attempted coup in 1924 Germany that kills a servant’s husband, and the rise of the working class in 1920s England that begins a decline in the aristocracy. The series ends on New Year’s Eve of 1925.
In 2019, series creator Julian Fellowes released the first DOWNTON ABBEY movie. The movie tells how King George V and Queen Mary visited Downton Abbey in 1927. Tom, the family’s socialist chauffeur, who ironically has become the family’s land agent for their estate and marries into the family, thwarts an assassination attempt on the King.
In the second movie, DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA, released in 2022, a film production invades the estate in 1928 to shoot a silent movie. However, the crew has to switch their movie to a talkie, with help from the family and the servants. Meanwhile, Mary, the heiress to the estate, starts having more marital problems because of her husband’s prolonged absence at a road rally.
DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE opens in 1930 with some members of the family and several servants in London attending BITTER SWEET, a musical play by popular English playwright and songwriter Noël Coward. The play stars the actor, Guy Dexter, who played the lead in the movie being filmed at the estate in 1928. During the filming, Dexter informed the family’s young butler, Barrow, a closeted homosexual, that he too is a homosexual. He invited Dexter to pose as his wardrobe assistant so they can be together. Barrow worked for Dexter in Hollywood and now is working for him in the play. Barrow invited the family to visit backstage with Dexter and the play’s author, Mr. Coward. Mary seems to suspect Barrow’s relationship with Dexter, but her father, Lord Robert Crawley, is comically oblivious. Everyone, however, has a fun time visiting with Dexter and the witty and personable Noël Coward, who by this time has become the most acclaimed British playwright of the early 20th Century since George Bernard Shaw. (Shaw lived from 1856 to 1950, and Coward lived from 1899 to 1973.)
Th next day, however, newspaper headlines scream that Mary’s husband, Henry Talbot, has released news of his official divorce with her. The public announcement of a divorce among the highest ranks of England’s aristocracy shocks the country. Later that day, at a fancy party in London, the aristocratic hostess forces Mary to leave before the King and Queen arrive. Mary pleads with her parents to stay, while she slinks away in a taxi back to their house in London. However, her parents shortly follow when the royals leave the party early.
Back at Downton Abbey in Yorkshire, the family accepts the arrival of the mother, Cora’s, American brother, Uncle Harold. Years ago, before Season One of the TV series, Robert Crawley had married Cora, an American heiress, and her dowry and, later, inheritance, had resolved his father’s financial difficulties at the time. Uncle Harold arrives, but he brings his new financial advisor, a slick-talking guy named Gus Sambrook. Regrettably, Harold informs everyone that he’s lost much his and Cora’s money and inheritance in America from their late mother. However, he assures the family that Gus has a way to add to what’s left of the money. Sadly, the loss of the money puts the Crawley family’s finances in dire straits. Cora is beginning to think she made a mistake letting Harold control that money.
That night, after dinner, Gus seduces Mary with his charm, helped along by copious amounts of alcohol. He’s clearly attracted to her, and his charm lifts Mary’s dour mood about her divorce and her loss of social prestige. Gus convinces Mary to spend the night, but she regrets it in the morning when she wakes with a hangover.
Meanwhile, Isobel Crawley, a distant relative of Mary’s father and the mother of Mary’s first late husband, who died in an auto accident, is leading the committee for the upcoming County Fair. Isobel takes great pleasure in putting two of Downton Abbey’s most likeable servants, retiring butler Mr. Carson and cook Daisy on the committee. She loves tweaking the self-righteous attitude of the local snob, Sir Hector Moreland, who also serves on the committee. At the same time, Mr. Carson is sad about his upcoming retirement from the estate.
Mary’s mother, Cora, tries to lift her daughter’s spirits by arranging for a dinner party in her honor to celebrate a decision by Mary’s father to name her as the official head of the estate. However, her local aristocratic friends decline the invitation. So, Cora invites Dexter, Barrow and Noël Coward to the dinner party, and Mary’s sister and some servants help Cora spread the word that Coward will be coming. Sure enough, the RSVPs start streaming in to Cora.
Finally, the family hears through the grapevine that Uncle Harold’s friend, Sam, is definitely a conman who probably stole Uncle Harold and Cora’s money. However, Sam has hinted to Mary that he’s not above blackmailing her about their one-night stand if she doesn’t back his new financial scheme.
DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE is thoroughly engaging and moving, and sometimes even profound. Despite some Romantic philosophical and historical notions, it has some traditional, conservative attitudes that extol duty, respect for the past, service, family, compassion and hospitality for other people even when they fall, and respect between master and servant. For example, in at least one scene the servants honor Mary’s parents for their leadership in running the estate, and Mary’s father personally salutes the honorable way in which the retiring butler, Mr. Carson, served him over the years. At the end, Mary’s father and mother gracefully step back to let Mary replace them as “Lady of the Manor,” even though her husband, Henry, divorced her, and even though Mary made a fool of herself by letting the charming con man ply her with liquor and seduce her when Mary was at her most vulnerable. These dramatic situations and relationships sometimes reminded MOVIEGUIDE®’s reviewer of the compassionate way the great French film director Jean Renoir treated the flawed heroes, knaves and villains in such classic movies as GRAND ILLUSION, RULES OF THE GAME and THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE.
That said, the villainous con man and the snobbish and pompous Sir Hector don’t come off too well in THE GRAND FINALE. Also, Producer/Writer/Creator Julian Fellowes and Director Simon Curtis clearly document the shifting cultural mores of British society in their movie. Mary’s divorce has shocked Mary’s society, which frowns on such things as divorce. Thus, the national newspapers and the traditional, conservative aristocrats want to shame and shun Mary and her husband, even though, back then, they may have cut the husband some slack because he’s a man and isn’t really part of the aristocracy, something they wouldn’t do for Mary.
Also, although Noël Coward’s talent and British patriotism found much favor in England, some conservatives didn’t like the immoral behavior in many of his plays, especially the early ones. For example, they sometimes featured such behavior as cocaine addiction, nymphomania, adultery, and bisexuality. Also, publicly, Coward was himself a secret homosexual. By age 14, which performing in theatrical productions, he was seduced by a 34- or 35-year-old artist who was a friend of journalist and art critic Robbie Ross, the first homosexual lover of the famous Irish playwright and author Oscar Wilde. At 17, Ross purposely set out to seduce the 32-year-old Wilde, who eventually was sent to prison for two years for hiring a 16-year-old male prostitute and died two years after completing his sentence. However, Coward wrote a patriotic play titled CAVALCADE about an upper-middle-class British family and their servants from 1899 to 193O. An American movie version of the play in 1933 won the Oscar for Best Picture. Coward also wrote, co-directed and starred in the patriotic 1942 World War II movie IN WHICH WE SERVE.
So, despite its strong moral worldview about duty, family, service, and, DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE has some Romantic philosophical and cultural notions about social change. Those notions promote the idea that society sometimes becomes too restrictive and must become more tolerant of things like divorce and homosexuality. That said, the movie doesn’t depict any homosexual activity and only implies that the recently divorced Mary sleeps with an unmarried man after drinking too much. MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for teenagers and adults.
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