Well, if it is to be my fate to be addicted to SOME soap-opera, it might as well be "Downton Abbey." After all, I'm of the age for it—elderly and impatient with commercials.
Plus, it always was impressively cast, performed, and smartly written (by creator Lord Julian Fellowes), with enough intrigues amid the family (while also negotiating historical events) to keep the considerable cast going for six seasons of episodes.* Yes, it's soapy, and far too nostalgic for the past while also acknowledging that the way of life is, without a doubt, past its sell-date and will be replaced with less familial trappings and a more (Lords help us!) egalitarian sense that would be self-evident if one didn't live in a huge estate with a peerage and a schedule that wasn't filled with breakfasts, lunches, dinners, tea, and high tea that one can barely squeeze in a cracking round of croquet. Why, it's so precious that one could even forgive Fellowes for writing The Tourist.
No. No. There are SOME things that just shouldn't be allowed...even in the most liberal of households.
So, as change is inevitable, one notices that things are quite a bit different in Downton Abbey: A New Era, since the first movie which was derived from the series a couple years ago. The first thing I noticed was that the film opens on a bloody hectic "drone" shot, not the quaintly hovering aerials taken from hot-air balloons as previously. I suppose there's so much plot in this one that one felt the need to rush into it a bit with a jarring anachronistic approach with a shot through a stained glass church window. We're attending the marriage of Tom Branson (Allen Leech) and Lucy Smith—née Bagshaw—(Tuppence Middleton). Once doesn't want to get too far into the weeds here (one can attest from looking at the lingering shots of lawns that Downtown Abbey doesn't HAVE weeds) but Tom is the Irish former Downton chauffeur who married the youngest Crawley daughter (who died, leaving him with a legitimate Crawley heir) and we left the last movie with him promising to write to Lucy—maid to Imelda Staunton's Maud Bagshaw (Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen), but actually Maud's illegitimate daughter. Those letters must have been some hot stuff as, in the time one can do pre-production of a sequel, they've gone from admiring flirtation to walking down the aisle.
Oh, dear me. We ARE in the weeds, aren't we? And so soon. This is what happens when one tries to explain soap-ish operas to any level of understanding. One is conflicted between trying to be informative while also employing brevity. One can't have one without the other without appearing devoid of either. Shall we move on? To the Cliff's Notes version?
There are two plot-threads in ...A New Era (a quite neat little title), one involving the revelation that the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Grantham (Maggie Smith) has been bequeathed a villa in the French Riviera by an acquaintance from her past—a past that brings up many questions that go unanswered but much speculated on—and that comes with it an invitation to visit by many of the Grantham's to see what's what and why, while, at the same time, (in a move that surely seems "meta" to the Lord and Lady Carnarvon, who own Highclere Castle, which serves as Downton Abbey) the family has received a request to use Downton as a film location which, although on the surface feels distasteful, comes with it a generous sum that would aid in much needed repairs to the estate's leaky roof. So, while some members go off to the south of France, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), the Earl's oldest daughter, remains behind to oversee the prevention of chaos by the invading film production.
The Dowager Countess herself is too frail to travel, but is resigned to stay at home, leaving the past in the past, and the villa in the future hands of her great grand-daughter, both of whose parents are now not of her blood. It's a legacy to a family member who would otherwise receive nothing.
Her son, Robert (Hugh Bonneville) is curious to learn what the story is and begins to worry about his actual parentage, all the while being soothed by his American wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), who may have medical issues of her own.
Back at the Abbey, the staff is all agog at meeting the stars of the film, a silent pot-boiler called "The Gambler," primarily dashing Guy Dexter (Dominic West) and the porcelain Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock)—who, it must be said, is something of a diva. Her manner is in stark contrast with her background, for though she is, indeed, a beauty, her accent reveals her to be a Cockney. This causes complications as the film is canceled mid-shooting as the studio is no longer interested in making silent pictures, as the market is now demanding "talkies."
Yes, they use the Singin' in the Rain gambit, where the starlet has a voice completely unsuitable to her image and post-production "dubbing" is used to temporarily solve "the problem." This is such a minor plot-point in the movie that I don't think I'm spoiling anything by mentioning it. Certainly, there are other bombshells that I won't reveal as mentioning them would surely rankle.
There is one little thing that popped into my head hours after the film, stemming from this film showing Bonneville's Lord Grantham breaking down into tears, not once but twice. It is always done in private and always in anticipation of some heart-wrenching event. And then it occurred to me—"Ah! That's how he does it!" With all the vagaries that life bestows upon him, Robert has always been something of a rock, although able to appreciate humor and irony, and quite capable of taking umbrage. But, he gets his weeping done out of the public eye, so that when disaster strikes and he must be the "7th Earl of Grantham," he can keep a stiff upper lip and present a stoic facade to the public. Jolly good show, Earl!
And Downton Abbey: A New Era is a jolly good show. It all goes down like comfort food, with just enough spice to make it memorable, but not too much to make it unpalatable. And it provides a good repertoire of memorable "catty" lines that one can use to sound snarky while appearing high-toned. There may be some continuity jumps a couple times—I think that is due to cramming so much material into a little over two hours that some connective tissue hit the cutting room floor—but, all in all, the Empire of Downton Abbey remains strong and may the sun never set on it.
* Just to show how well-cast—and inhabited—these roles are, I always find it a shock to see pictures of the actors on the red carpet in contemporary fashions. So many of them seem unrecognizable out of period clothes.
The Battle of Mrs. Miller ("Whose Side Are You On?") or "What Becomes a Legend Most?"
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" says Prospero in "The Tempest." Prospero and Shakespeare run throughMy Week with Marilyn(the latest confection of young love and fictionalized reality—with appearance by Judi Dench—from the Weinstein Company) like Caliban, a spirit of confused form and intent in Shakespeare's play. All the revelers in Simon Curtis' film (written—especially well by Adrian Hodges) are real, based on real individuals and events, but how true they are to the source is questionable, given as they are to interpretation and expectations, and to the dreams of the participants, for whom the movies and fame is a business, an art, as well as personal obsessions.
None more so than Norma Jeane Baker, who inhabited our world and our dreams as Marilyn Monroe, a free spirit trapped in prison bars formed of klieg lights, a vessel that men poured their love and lust onto and women their princess dreams of being the most popular girl in the world. Heavy, heavy burden, that, and she bore it from the lowliest, sleeziest agent in Hollywood to Kings of the Sports World and Men of Letters. She also bore it from other film stars, who looked at her fame and wanted a piece of it (and maybe her, as well), including Sir Laurence Olivier, who insisted on casting Marilyn in his production of The Prince and the Showgirl, a trifling movie if ever there was one, despite being written by Terence Rattigan, and despite having had a success of it on the stage.
What Marilyn saw in doing the movie was obvious; she was working with the world's greatest Shakespearean actor and director on a film written by an acknowledged writer. Why Olivier wanted to do this is less so: financial success for his un-barded film; name recognition to draw the crowds for a film out of his metier; maybe he just wanted Marilyn, as so many men did, and the new bride of American playwright Arthur Miller (not the best looking guy in the world) might have provided a world to conquer for the actor who played so much ambitious Shakespearean royalty. Whatever the reason, Olivier was constantly frustrated with the fragile, neurotic actress, who had other concerns besides working with the exacting director—it was the only film she made outside of her protective home studio, 20th Century Fox, the only film she made outside of the United States, and the first film of her fledgling production company—all unique concerns that might have distracted the actress, on top of her new marriage to Miller and a hushed-up pregnancy during filming that resulted in a miscarriage.
The film that Hodges and Curtis have crafted from the events and a tell-all written about it by filmmaker Colin Clark (played by Eddie Redmayne), is one of the better ones to be made of this type. Casting has a lot to do with it. Michelle Williams is not the first person I would picture as Norma Jean, but the versatile actress manages to capture the presence of the human being at the core of the starand suggest the winsomeness that charmed so many in her orbit.
Kenneth Branagh has been linked with Olivier for most of his career, paralleling the legendary thesp by making his own film directing debut with a gritty, strapping version of Olivier's own first directorial effort of Henry V.His portrayal of Olivier might seem too easy, but there was nothing about the man that was 'easy," and Branagh has a fine time, mixing Olivier voices, accents, and mercurial swings throughout the film—his Olivier is never consistent in mood, manner or method, just as you'd expect a Master Thespian to be (he maximizes the precision of great lines like "Teaching Miss Monroe to ACT is like trying to teach URDU to a BADGER!"), but undermined with the idea that Monroe's "presence" on-screen had nothing to do with his efforts behind the camera.
Rounding out the cast are such fine performers as Toby Jones (hilariously indecent as Marilyn's publicist and future Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs), Dench—playing a woman she once acted with, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, and Weinstein go-to girl Julia Ormond as Olivier wife-partner, Vivien Leigh, as well as turns by Zoë Wanamaker, Derek Jacobi, Emma Watson, and one of my favorites, Michael Kitchen. Redmayne is fine and callow, as he's supposed to be, eyes always a little bit wide at a new turn of events in the film business, and a tentative, crooked half-smile his constant fall-back.
The script is full of great zingers about fame, fortune, the madness of the movie business, and how hard people work to make things look effortless (and on-time), as well as loads of gossipy references for "the blue-hairs." It also has a nice undercurrent that touches on fantasy and reality—hence the Prospero—and the process by which reality and the illusion of reality can really mess us up...if we believe our own "press." Sometimes the illusion of reality is nothing more than fantasy—the very stuff that dreams are made on. And the makers of fantasy are just as susceptible as the rest of us—maybe even more. My Week with Marilyn brings to the imagination such thoughts, beyond just being a tale of the Myth of Marilyn.
She did exist in reality. And her reality had little to do with her fantasy. The camera loved her and made us love her image. And that's what killed her.
Olivier and Monroe on-set and Monroe at the premiere party
So, as change is inevitable, one notices that things are quite a bit different in Downton Abbey: A New Era, since the first movie which was derived from the series a couple years ago. The first thing I noticed was that the film opens on a bloody hectic "drone" shot, not the quaintly hovering aerials taken from hot-air balloons as previously. I suppose there's so much plot in this one that one felt the need to rush into it a bit with a jarring anachronistic approach with a shot through a stained glass church window. We're attending the marriage of Tom Branson (Allen Leech) and Lucy Smith—née Bagshaw—(Tuppence Middleton). Once doesn't want to get too far into the weeds here (one can attest from looking at the lingering shots of lawns that Downtown Abbey doesn't HAVE weeds) but Tom is the Irish former Downton chauffeur who married the youngest Crawley daughter (who died, leaving him with a legitimate Crawley heir) and we left the last movie with him promising to write to Lucy—maid to Imelda Staunton's Maud Bagshaw (Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen), but actually Maud's illegitimate daughter. Those letters must have been some hot stuff as, in the time one can do pre-production of a sequel, they've gone from admiring flirtation to walking down the aisle.
