The title of "Downton Abbey: A New Era" pledges that change has arrived at the Grantham family's mansion after six seasons of television, a previous film and a zeitgeist shift that has caused a chunk of the show's original audience to start regarding its characters' generational wealth with disgust and relish, as though it were a wheel of rotten Stilton. The stately series that began its story with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has now arrived at the tail end of the 1920s. The choppy waters of modernity are materializing on the horizon. To stay afloat, this amiable sequel decides to ever so slightly democratize itself: The upstairs-downstairs division that has long separated the estate's masters from their servants begins to leak. So does Downton Abbey's roof, which motivates Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to rent the cash-poor estate to a team shooting a silent film - makers of "kin-ema," as Lady Mary's father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), calls it, disdainfully mispronouncing the name of the art form. (The moviemaking plot point may have been inspired by real life: The franchise's shooting location, Highclere Castle, which resembles a vampire bat's underbite, opened its doors to the show after Geordie Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and Queen Elizabeth II's godson, realized that dozens of its rooms were rotting.) Downton Abbey: A New Era takes us back to those familiar faces, but it's clear from the first bars of that gorgeous, rousing theme music that things are a little different this time around. The establishing shots of the house and the surrounding estate make the place seem so stately and grand that I actually gasped when I beheld them. The 2019 film was directed by Michael Engler, who has spent more than 25 years helming episodes of TV shows like My So-Called Life, Sex and the City, and, yes, Downton Abbey. Not, I hasten to add, that there's anything wrong with that. There were some excellent sequences in the first film, especially its dynamic opening scene. But it looked like an episode of television, specifically an extended episode of Downton Abbey., the acting, the emotion of the film was the best I've seen since the first episode of Downton Abbey in 2010.
Thank you Maggie Smith.
Thank you Maggie Smith.