Despite my best intentions (a week long hospitalization will do that), I finally got to see the Downton movie today.
It's piffle. Enjoyable, charming piffle. Very pretty piffle. Piffle with a budget. But piffle. And I mean that in the best possible way.
It was exactly what I expected from the film. Two hours with these characters, doing the things that I knew from watching the series for six years these characters would do, is no bad thing. The tone meanders exactly as the tone of the series itself meandered. The moments that were meant to be funny were amusing, the moments that were mawkishly sentimental were moving. If there's anything to complain about, it's that the characters seem as though they were frozen in amber since last we saw them, and some actors have so little screen time you wonder what was the point in having them appear at all except that they were around at the end of the series (thinking of Bates, Baxter, and Talbot here).
It all works. It's not really a film, more like an extended episode of the series with a higher budget and more leisurely filming schedule, yet all it really needs to be is a fine time with these characters, and that it does. The plot, such as it is, is wholly incidental to letting the characters welcome us back into their world. It's piffle, the nicest sort of piffle, and that's all anyone needs from Downton Abbey.
