Downton Abbey

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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My friend Paula loves all things royal. She stayed home from work to watch the wedding of Princess Diana on TV. She did the same for Meghan and Harry. When Kate married Prince William she bought herself a fascinator. She even named her children William, Andrew, and Philip after members of the royal family.

She’s quite the aware anglophile.

You can imagine how excited she is that TV’s “Downton Abbey” is coming to the big screen as a movie. She followed all six seasons on PBS.

And even better – the movie’s plot has to do with a visit to Downton Abbey by the British royal family.

Of course, set in 1927, the royal visitors to the Yorkshire country estate of Downtown Abbey are King George V and Queen Mary.

As we all know, “Downton Abbey” depicts the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family, the hereditary Earls of Grantham, and their domestic servants in the post-Edwardian era. It tells how an old-money family struggles to cope in the modern age.

Happily for fans, the movie version of “Downton Abbey” is a sequel, taking up where the TV show left off. It is currently showing off its lavish upstairs-downstairs lifestyle at Tropic Cinema.

The movie (like the television series which ran from 2010-2015 on Britain’s ITV) is the brainchild of Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford Deputy Lieutenant. Fellowes is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. He won an Academy Award for his screenplay for “Gosford Park,” a 2001 British murder mystery film. The Gosford Park country estate is mindful of Fellowes’s future Downton Abbey.

Julian Fellowes wrote the screenplay for the new “Downton Abbey” movie. An American, Michael Engler (best known for various television series and TV movies) directed this historical drama. The collaborative results were quite successful, staying true to the highest rated drama series ever shown on PBS.

Highclere Castle, a magnificent Jacobethan style country house in Hampshire, once again stands in for the fictional Downton Abbey.

Much of the original television cast returns, including Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern as Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham, and his American-born wife Cora. Also Laura Carmichael is back as Lady Edith Pelham.

Other familiar faces include Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery, Brendan Coyle, Allen Leach, Sophie McShera, Henry Hadden-Paxton, Kevin Doyle, Penelope Wilton, Matthew Goode … and, of course, Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.

Simon Jones and Geraldine James play the visiting King and Queen.

Downtown Abbey offers a glimpse into another time, another social hierarchy that we Americans have enjoyed observing from afar. We encounter the familiar footmen and valets, butlers and maids, but this time around (thanks to the royal tour) Downton Abbey is besieged by royal staff, ranging from the Royal Page of the Backstairs to the Queen’s Royal Dresser.

The storyline delivers the prerequisite drama, romance, jealousy and intrigue among the Crawley family and its staff. Like the TV series the movie is both elegant and witty. The scenery is spectacular, the settings lavish, the acting precise, and the social interplay fascinating.

Toward the end of the movie, the Crawleys’ daughter Mary asks her husband Henry if they should keep Downton Abbey, to which Henry replies “We’re stuck with it, aren’t we?”

Good news for fans.

Note: Like my friend Paula, Queen Elizabeth is said to be a big fan of “Downton Abbey.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com