In The 'Downton Abbey' Film, A Royal Visit Proves Rather A Spot Of Bother
The new film is "less a victory lap than a cakewalk." Everything about the TV series — those aspects you loved, and those you didn't — is reproduced here with astonishing fidelity.
There is nostalgia, and there is Downton Abbey.
Nostalgia bathes the past in a golden light that falls patchily, shining clear and steady on what was tidy and genteel, while leaving an era's ugliest, most brutal recesses sunk in shadow.
The light thrown by over the course of its six televised seasons proved even more fitful; creator Julian Fellowes illumined a past where rigid class distinctions existed to make everyone, high-born and low-, know their place and keep to it happily. The noble Crawley family worked so hard looking after their vast Yorkshire country estate that they found themselves, on more than one occasion, made slightly late for tea. Occasionally a servant might fall out of line, exhibiting anything from a
