With the exception of Lady Mary's conspicuously absent husband, everyone and everything arrives right on schedule in "Downton Abbey: A New Era." A silent-film director with an eye for manorial splendor turns up with his cast and crew, to the delight of the starstruck servants and anyone who likes a self-satisfied movie-within-a-movie in-joke. A perfectly timed intrigue beckons from the south of France, sending several of the Crawleys off for a few days of sunshine (which almost explains why several of them seem to be sporting poorly applied spray tans). Meanwhile, as those who saw the last movie know, the grim specter of death has also come to Downton, and it too chooses just the right moment, eliciting a few wails and sniffles in between stiff-upper-lip one-liners.
Yes, even the end comes with giggles and reassurances at Downton Abbey, a place so overstuffed with cushions and tapestries that soft landings are all but guaranteed. That was more or less the point of the original Julian Fellowes-created series, which opened on a chaotic moment in 1912, when it appeared that the Crawleys' gleaming world of aristocratic pleasure and privilege might soon be endangered. Still, in episode after episode, said world managed to prevail over nearly every threat formed against it, whether it came from without (World War I!) or within (scheming servants, first-wave feminist stirrings). Whether you saw this as a loving affirmation of family or proof of a hopelessly classist worldview, the series went down smoothly enough, greased by the droll witticisms of Violet, the Dowager Countess (the great Maggie Smith), and propelled by Fellowes' skill at distributing his sympathies, at least superficially, between upstairs and downstairs.
Fellowes already did that superbly in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Robert Altman's "Gosford Park," 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. In the 2019 film, the occasion was a royal visit; in the misleadingly titled "Downton Abbey: A New Era," it's a film production, led by a producer-director (Hugh Dancy) who wants to shoot on location at Downton. Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), the ever-more-irrelevant lord of the manor, is appalled at the suggestion: Imagine allowing a breed of humanity as vulgar as actors (wink-wink) to besmirch their palace beautiful.
