Downton Abbey - The End

 

Since its first appearance on British and American TV almost 15 years ago, Downton Abbey, created and co-written by Lord Julian Fellowes, has mesmerized modern audiences, most of whom have no living memory of the era and way of life it portrays. After six memorable seasons, taking the Crawley dynasty from 1912 through World War I and into the 1920s, the series followed up with two full-length movies. Now a third movie, set in 1930 - Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale - has been released to bring the saga to its final glorious close.

The world around us is violent, frightening, and depressing. Julian Fellowes, however, has continued to offer us alternative images of other worlds (actually the same world in other - comparably problematic but different - periods). The TV series, set on the fictional Yorkshire estate (portrayed by the real Highclere Castle) of the earls of Grantham, depicted the "upstairs-downstairs" lives of the Crawley family and their household servants, as they navigated their personal and family lives, against the background of a dramatically changing British society. It was one of the most watched television series on both sides of the Atlantic, and is considered to have been the most successful British period drama since the 1981 television serial of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The TV series and its two film sequels have now come to a grand finale in this final movie.

Fellowes is also the creator of the spectacular HBO series The Gilded Age, which has just completed its third season. In that season, set in New York moneyed society in the mid-18880s, Bertha Russell struck a blow against society's ban on divorced women. In Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, however, that ban is still very real in early 1930's Britain, where Lady Mary Crawley's second marriage has ended in divorce. (Presumably, we the audience are intended to view Lady Mary's difficulties from within a 21st century sensibility that favors divorce, or at least regards it as a private matter of minor consequence.)

Personally, I was sad to see Lady Mary's marriage end, but Julian Fellowes has never been one to give his characters easily happy endings (even if they do all get authentically happy endings at the series' end and now at the movie's end).

Lady's Mary's successful navigation through the troubled sea of social opprobrium brought about by her divorce is the symbolic leitmotif that permeates this saga of our familiar and beloved characters as they close chapters in their lives and (presumably) move forward to starting new chapters. In the end, multiple chapters have been closed, and we are invited to envision new futures for our familiar and beloved characters (which will sadly never be portrayed on screen). In particular, Lord and Lady Grantham, Mr. and Mrs. Carson, Mr. and Mrs. Mason, Mr. and Mrs. Parker, Mr. and Mrs. Molesley, Mr. and Mrs. Bates are all happily (albeit with some nostalgic sadness) moving forward to starting new chapters in their long lives.

A nice touch at the end is a nostalgic moment of retrospective reverie in which Lady Mary remembers Matthew and Sybill, and, of course, Violet. It is a nice way to end a long and deeply touching, ultimately very human story, which ultimately highlights the things that matter most in people's lives and families, regardless of time and place and the passing vagaries of political regimes, social classes, and institutions.