Downton Abbey (film, 2019) Starring Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Maggie Smith

The whole film is built from that one event: the letter, the preparations, the arrival of the royal servants, a parade, a state dinner, and a ball. Julian Fellowes took the idea from a real royal visit, when King George V and Queen Mary went to Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire in 1912.

Plot

A letter travels by post train, van, and bicycle to Downton Abbey, where Andy Parker, first footman, recognizes the royal seal before anyone has opened it.

Their Majesties are coming. King George V and Queen Mary will break their Yorkshire tour at Downton for a lunch, a parade of the Yorkshire Hussars, a dinner, and a ball at a neighboring house.

Lady Mary Talbot, eldest daughter of the house who now runs the estate, doubts that the new butler Thomas Barrow is equal to an occasion of this scale. She asks Charles Carson, the former butler, to come out of retirement for one week. Barrow, humiliated, stands aside and withdraws.

Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, is less exercised by the King than by the Queen's lady-in-waiting, Maud Bagshaw, who is her son's cousin and has cut him out of her will without explaining why.

The royal household arrives ahead of the royal couple. Monsieur Courbet, the King's chef, takes the kitchen from Beryl Patmore, the cook, and Mr. Wilson, the royal Page of the Backstairs, informs the Downton servants that they are not required. Only Richard Ellis, the King's valet, treats them as colleagues.

Small objects begin to go missing from the house.

Lady Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, arrives with her husband, Bertie Pelham, Marquess of Hexham, and a marriage under strain. The King means to send Bertie abroad with the Prince of Wales's tour for months, and Edith has not yet told her husband that she is expecting a child.

Below stairs, the insult becomes intolerable. Anna Bates, lady's maid to Lady Mary, and her husband John Bates, valet to Lord Grantham, organize a quiet mutiny, and by the evening of the dinner Downton servants have contrived to remove the royal staff from the kitchen, the dining room, and the house entirely.

Thomas Barrow, at a loose end, is taken into York by Richard Ellis, who leads him to a club where men dance together. The police raid it, Barrow is arrested, and Ellis gets him out of the cell.

In the village, Tom Branson, the estate's agent and the widower of the youngest Crawley daughter, is approached by a man calling himself Major Chetwode, who talks about Ireland, republicanism, and the sympathies they must surely share.Branson understands what he is and says nothing.

At the parade, Chetwode raises a pistol at the King. Branson brings him to the ground, and Lady Mary takes the gun out of his hand.

Maud Bagshaw's secret comes out at last. Her lady's maid, Lucy Smith, is her illegitimate daughter and her heir, and Tom Branson, a chauffeur who married an earl's daughter, is the one person in the house who finds nothing scandalous in it.

At the ball, Violet Crawley takes her granddaughter aside and tells her quietly that she is dying, and that Lady Mary is now the future of Downton.

Cast

• Hugh Bonneville as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham

  

• Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham

  

• Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham

  

• Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot

  

• Laura Carmichael as Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham

  

• Imelda Staunton as Maud Bagshaw, lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary

  

• Tuppence Middleton as Lucy Smith, lady's maid to Maud Bagshaw
• Geraldine James as Queen Mary
• Simon Jones as King George V
• Jim Carter as Charles Carson, retired butler
• Phyllis Logan as Elsie Carson, housekeeper
• Robert James-Collier as Thomas Barrow, butler
• Allen Leech as Tom Branson, estate agent
• Penelope Wilton as Isobel Grey, Lady Merton
• Max Brown as Richard Ellis, valet to King George V
• David Haig as Mr. Wilson, royal Page of the Backstairs

Maggie Smith plays the news of her own death the way the Dowager Countess has met every other subject in nine years, briskly and with the emphasis on the practical arrangements. Violet Crawley tells her granddaughter that she is ill in the same tone she would use about a dinner seating, and then moves directly to the question of the estate.

Michelle Dockery gives Lady Mary the film's least decorative performance, a woman visibly tired, doing arithmetic behind a smile. Hugh Bonneville's Lord Grantham and Elizabeth McGovern's Lady Grantham are largely spectators to their daughter's management of the house, which is the point the script keeps making.

Robert James-Collier has the most substantial story below stairs. Barrow's evening in York is the first time in the whole franchise that the character is allowed to want something openly, and the cell he wakes up in is the first time the risk is shown rather than implied.

Imelda Staunton plays Maud Bagshaw as a woman who settled her intentions long ago and is waiting for her relations to catch up. Geraldine James's Queen Mary says very little and notices everything, and Jim Carter's Carson returns visibly relieved to be back inside his own liturgy.

Production

Principal photography began in London in late August 2018 and moved to Highclere Castle in Hampshire, the series' Downton, by late September. Donal Woods returned as production designer, so the state rooms and the Ealing-built servants' quarters matched the television series exactly.

The other locations were chosen for scale. The ball was filmed at Harewood House, Wentworth Woodhouse supplied further grandeur, and Alnwick Castle, Lacock, the Beamish Museum, and the streets of Little Germany in Bradford provided the town and the shops. The train sequences were shot on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

The parade meant bringing more than a hundred troopers and their horses into a village, which required building stables and a camp to house them. Gareth Neame, the producer, said the sight he remembered was the entire cast in costume with eighty mounted men on one of the finest days of the year.

Julian Fellowes had to write to a different shape. In a television episode four or five characters carry the story while the others support them, with a different four or five the following week, but in a film everyone needs a thread and every thread has to be resolved, which he described as a good deal of plaiting.

Anna Robbins designed the costumes, working again with John Bright and the costume house Cosprop in London. Cosprop holds garments from Queen Mary's own wardrobe, which were studied for their construction, and Geraldine James's Queen Mary costume was made using fabric taken from one of the real Queen's dresses.

For the ball, Michelle Dockery and Elizabeth McGovern both wore genuine 1920s gowns that were then reworked. Every bead on Dockery's French evening dress was hand-lengthened so the fringe reached the floor, and her tiara was set with Swarovski crystals.

Maggie Smith's jewels were not paste. Her tiara was a nineteenth-century platinum piece carrying sixteen and a half carats of diamonds, lent by Bentley and Skinner of Piccadilly, and her lilac ball gown was found in a vintage shop in Paris and dyed from its original turquoise.

John Lunn rescored his television theme for full orchestra. Ben Smithard photographed Highclere in wide, formal compositions the series had neither the schedule nor the lenses for, so the house is presented less as a location than as the largest member of the cast.

Release/reception

Downton Abbey opened in the United Kingdom on 13 September 2019 and in the United States on 20 September. Advance sales in America ran ahead of every other adult drama of the year, and the film took $31 million in its opening weekend, the largest opening in the history of Focus Features.

It finished with $96.9 million in the United States and Canada and $97.8 million elsewhere, for roughly $194.7 million worldwide. Deadline Hollywood calculated its net profit at about $88 million.

Reviews were mild and warm. It holds an approval rating of 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics' summary called it a fittingly resplendent homecoming, and a score of 64 on Metacritic, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an A.

Anna Robbins was named Costume Designer of the Year at the Hollywood Film Awards and was nominated for the Satellite Award and several critics' prizes, with Donal Woods nominated for production design.

Critics who objected that little is at stake were describing the film accurately: a broken boiler, a stolen letter opener, a parade, and a family's standing. What the production understood is that the audience had come for a house full of people it already knew, dressed past all reason, and a royal visit was sufficient reason to assemble them.