★★★

You’d be hard pressed to find anything in this third and final Downton outing that lives up to the ‘Grand’ of its title. The stakes could scarcely be lower – ‘How are you getting on with Mary’s plan to plumb the cottages?’ – while a third act village fate never really feels like the culmination of fifteen years of storytelling. Certainly, its direct predecessor found more pathos in the departure of the late Dame Maggie Smith. Such is not to say that fans of the long-running, period soap will want for more. Downton’s Grand Finale makes for an outstandingly tepid watch but not without charm.

In the absence of scale, The Grand Finale pursues the closure of circularity, drawing on narrative strings that thread way back to the series’ 2010 debut. Back when the series enjoyed the same critical favourably as global popularity. When Fellow’s pen was sharp, as it were. So it is that the hereditary principle continues to direct the trajectory the film, with diverting deviations delivered courtesy of the ongoing scandals afforded Michelle Dochery’s Lady Mary Crawley, next in line for the estate management, should her father, Hugh Bonneville’s 7th Earl of Grantham, ever find it in himself to step away. It is slightly harder now, mind, for Mary to hold a straight face when asserting that casual sex with visiting foreigners is not something she typically does than was the case when her series one dalliance with Mr. Pamuk rocked the family boat. Now, that was shocking. 

It takes Fellows some fifteen minutes to return us to the Abbey itself. The film opens, instead, to the rizzier environs of London, 1930, with the upstairs and downstairs of Downton encamped in the theatre for a performance of Noël Coward’s ‘Bitter Sweet’, with Guy Dexter – a returning Dominic West – cast in the lead. Later we will learn of Mary’s divorce, owing to the continued unavailability of Matthew Goode, via the shock waves it sends through the capital’s high society. It’s a scene pitched somewhere between devastation and farce that sees Mary thrown from Lady Petersfield’s (Joely Richardson) party for fear of her coming into contact with expected royals. Surely ostracisation won’t follow her to Yorkshire? It might, you know.

Three films in, we are now so far down the rabbit hole that Fellows finds himself beyond the point of pretending any of this matters. Elsewhere, Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is approaching retirement, Mr Carson (Jim Carter) is regretting retirement, Uncle Harold (Paul Giamatti) has squandered Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) inheritance, and Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton) squabbles with Sir Hector (a suitably pompous Simon Russell Beale) over control of the annual county fair. To give credit where due, Fellows deft hand for a large ensemble remains undiminished, with none here left floundering for a share in the script. Even dowdy Edith (Laura Carmichael) manages to circumnavigate a lack of active plotting to find her moment in the sun.

Naturally, the absence of Smith is felt here but not so much as one might expect. Perhaps Downton’s Grand Finale wants for a little sour to the sweet but there’s amusement enough in the antics of Kevin Doyle’s hapless Molesley, while nowhere else in 2025 will the word ‘bish’ enjoy deployment without irony. In Dockery, meanwhile, Smith’s eyebrow for the arch lives on. Where Fellows’ writing lacks so much as a modicum of subtlety, Dockery, at least, addresses the imbalance in a performance of strident backbone. She always has.

A touching final vignette reassures that this is indeed Fellows’ last trip to Downton. It would be miserly to say good riddance but the time feels right. As chauffeur turned estate man Branson (Allen Leech) stoically puts it: ‘sometimes I find the past is a more comfortable place than the future’. Not subtle but not wrong either.

T.S