Class bores

Here’s a fun Downton Abbey drinking game: pour yourself some champagne and take a sip every time a character says, “The world is changing, and we must change with it.” (Or some variation thereof.)

With this latest – and supposedly last — chapter in creator Julian Fellowes’ upstairs-downstairs saga, you’d be tipsy within 10 minutes.

Here’s the funny thing, though. Nothing ever changes in the gloriously impervious Downton universe. Never mind the First World War, the Roaring ’20s and the stock market crash, everyone and everything remains essentially the same.

After six television seasons and two previous films, Fellowes shepherds his familiar characters into the 1930s with flagrant fan service that is fabulously pretty and completely frictionless. While offering almost nothing new, then, this Grand Finale will provide reliable comfort viewing and a fitting farewell for Downton devotees.

There’s an odd kind of pleasure in how predictable it all is. Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) is still gently baffled and oblivious. Seeing former footman Thomas (Robert Collier-Dexter), returned from Hollywood with his lover, Guy Dexter (Dominic West), he remarks, “They’re very hearty with each other.”

Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) is still twinkling. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is still beautifully chilly, with occasional spectacular thaws. Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) — I almost left her out! — is still slightly overlooked but at least standing up for herself.

Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), the arch-conservative butler, is still complaining that “no one knows how to behave anymore.” Lady’s maid Anna (Joanne Froggat) and valet Bates (Brendan Coyle) are still sweet together.

Only housekeeper Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan) surprises, coming out with sex tips for a nervous Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol).

Then there is the backdrop — the Sèvres china, the Farrow & Ball paint colours, and the clothes. Oh, the clothes. There’s a red satin evening dress and a seafoam cashmere coat that are absolutely to die for, not to mention Lady Grantham’s exquisite crewel-work jackets. There’s an outing to Ascot and an evening with Noel Coward (Arty Foushan), who really knows how to make a party go.

There are carefully seeded callbacks, as when Lady Mary uses that newfangled term “weekend” and Lord Grantham suggests it’s a good thing his mother, the Dowager Countess, isn’t there to hear her say it. (Oh, would that she were, Maggie Smith’s drily ironic delivery being much missed.)

But the plot? Well, there’s lots of plot, in one sense, oodles of plot, but Fellowes having become almost pathologically conflict-averse since Downton Abbey’s third season, there is nothing remotely approaching dramatic conflict or emotional tension.

The big crisis in The Grand Finale is Lady Mary’s divorce, which means she will no longer be received in the best houses. This news drops, of course, during the highlight of the London season, the Petersfields’ annual ball, at which the whispered word “divorce” is so scandalous that the orchestra actually stops playing and everyone stares.

Meanwhile, back in rural Yorkshire, the wonderfully meddlesome Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton) is shaking up the organizing committee for the county agricultural show, previously run by “a rather narrow group of people,” much to the harumphing displeasure of stuffy Sir Hector Moreland (Simon Russell Beale).

We are at the start of the Great Depression, with one character announcing that “the crash changed everything,” and another speaking ominously about “these new taxes.”

Then there’s Paul Giamatti as Lady Grantham’s brother, Harold Levinson, who looks sheepish every time a reference is made to their late mama’s estate, suggesting that cash has gone astray.

Money matters continue to be conveniently vague, though, and the family’s one concession seems to be to perhaps sell their London house and buy a flat. (Lord Grantham is puzzled to learn there would be families living above and below them. “A sort of layer cake of strangers,” he muses. “Extraordinary.”)

Fellowes continues to benefit from his cast.

“The best playwright in the world is nothing without good actors,” comments former footman and recent screenwriter Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle). Fellowes is definitely not the best playwright, but even though every single bit of his dialogue is engineered to keep various subplots bowling along — nobody just chats in Downton Abbey — and upcoming twists are telegraphed with almost comical obviousness, the gifted cast can do extraordinary work with their often thuddingly ordinary lines.

Along with Downton’s stalwart regulars, Foushan’s Coward is quite delicious, Giamatti is a comic treat and Beale, a renowned stage actor, is terrifically peppery.

The ostensible theme is the older generation making room for the next generation, the past giving way to the future. (You know, change.) Below stairs, Mrs. Patmore and Carson are both set to retire, to be replaced by the recently married Daisy and Andy Parker (Sophie McShera and Michael Fox). Above stairs, Lord Grantham is trying to support Lady Mary as heir.

The overwhelming mood, though, is one of backward-looking nostalgia — for the television show, but also for its vision of a British past that never existed.

Take Anna’s spin on Downton’s master-servant relationships: “We all depend on each other, the way people should.”

That’s one way to describe feudalism, I guess.

At one point, an aristocratic wag shakes up the breakfast table by suggesting that one day they might actually have to cook for themselves. But there’s nothing in Fellowes’ world that makes that foreseeable, or even imaginable.

In fact, if this movie doesn’t end up being the finale suggested by its title, Fellowes’ stubbornly static and self-enclosed version of Downton could presumably sail through the Second World War, the welfare state, the Swinging ’60s and the Oasis reunion tour without putting a hair out of place.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca