Downton Abbey: A New Era Review: Thoughtfully Reheated Fan Service

At its best, A New Era quietly links its themes of entitlement and survival.

Downton Abbey: A New Era
Photo: Focus Features

There are enough Easter eggs in Simon Curtis’s Downton Abbey: A New Era to confirm that Julian Fellowes is as schooled in silent film history as he is in the rhythms and mannerisms of the British class system. But the film also suggests, improbably, that he may be a Ren & Stimpy super fan. In “Ren’s Retirement,” from season three of John Kricfalusi’s classic animated series, Ren is reminded on his 10th birthday that he’s 70 in dog years, which kicks into hysteric motion the preparations for his death, including the writing of a will and the search for a coffin. The episode is capped by a distraught Stimpy weeping over his best friend’s coffin, from which Ren pops out and squeals, “I can’t hear myself die!”

That exact line is uttered by a beloved Downton Abbey character toward the end of A New Era, and in response to a similar show of emotion. On the one hand, the words feel as if they could be directed at the film itself: for being so chockablock with reheated incident that it’s sometimes impossible to see it as anything other than a show of fan service. On the other, A New Era’s metatexual digressions—like the scene centered round a screening of the 1928 American pre-Code horror film The Terror, one of the first talkies—or just plain winking are just calculated enough that it’s fair to say that Fellowes is using them to evocatively draw a thematic line between his script’s by and large disconnected major plotlines.

The more pro-forma of the two plotlines concerns Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith) learning that she’s been bequeathed a villa in the south of France by an old, heretofore unmentioned flame who’s recently passed away. Subsequently, half of the Crawley clan travels by sea to France to learn why, and A New Era is almost immediately sunk by its episodic structure, given its preoccupation with character reintroductions and teasing other mysteries. Regarding the marquis’s will, suspicions about Robert’s (Hugh Bonneville) parentage are raised, and almost as soon as they’re put to rest, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) springs some unsettling news on her husband. All the while, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) mulls a return to journalism.

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Fellowes’s script makes it clear that the marquis went over his will multiple times, which seems intended to absolve the Crawleys of not hemming and hawing about the ethics of their denying the inheritance to the man’s widow (Nathalie Baye) and son (Jonathan Zacca). Perhaps it’s all meant to speak for itself, right down to Thomas Branson’s (Allen Leech) proletariat spirit having been dulled by the comforts of wealth. But given at least the way the Downton Abbey series confronted the hauteur with which the English view the less fortunate, namely through Dan Stevens’s Matthew Crawley, the failure to even have a single Crawley at least acknowledge their link in the chain of inter-generational wealth feels lazy at best.

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If the Crawleys who’ve traveled abroad are conspicuous by their lack of ethical questioning, those who’ve stayed behind are noticeably dealing with nothing of particular import. Yes, funds are needed to fix the leaking roof at Downton Abbey, but A New Era generally follows Robert’s lead when he says at one point, “We don’t have to talk about money.” Perhaps Fellowes feels that the Downton Abbey series had enough of that chatter.

Indeed, whatever money pinch the family feels is no longer felt as soon as they allow a production company to shoot a silent film, titled The Gambler, inside the house. The film’s director, Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy), has eyes for Mary (Michelle Dockery), but things remain on the up and up between them all the way through the production, which plays out as a thoughtful consideration of how the talkies sounded the death knell for many silent film stars.

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The less generous might point out that this stretch of A New Era, after The Gambler becomes a sound production and Mary steps in to dub the voice of silent movie star Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), is a brazen rip of Singin’ in the Rain. But call that a feature, not a defining characteristic. For one, the kindness that’s extended to Myrna, who’s only too happy to play the part of the petulant diva before she finds her true voice, is one that Jean Hagen’s Linda Lamont never received in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s musical classic.

The making of the film-within-the-film also becomes a springboard for capturing moments that subtly speak to what the cinema choses to reflect back on us and how it functions for Downton Abbey’s servants, some of whom are tasked to play extras in The Gambler, as a dream machine. And yet, Fellowes also sees it as opening other, more practical, doors of possibility for futures that can actually come to pass for individuals like Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle). As such, A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.

Score: 
 Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Maggie Smith, Imelda Staunton, Penelope Wilton, Laura Carmichael, Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Dominic West, Alex Macqueen, Nathalie Baye, Jonathan Zaccaï  Director: Simon Curtis  Screenwriter: Julian Fellowes  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 125 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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