Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025, Simon Curtis)

55/100

Best of the three films, though that's not saying much. (I'd intended to catch up with Ostensible Finale on I see now it's Peacock, who knows when, but was in San Jose for a couple of days on personal business and noticed that Camera 3, my hometown arthouse theater, was screening it on Wednesday night. Their schedule's very erratic these days so whenever an opportunity arises to see anything I'm even remotely interested in, I tend to jump on it, out of nostalgia for the venue.) This almost feels like an episode of the series, despite running double the length: We get an over-the-top anchor plot—Lady Mary becoming a social pariah following her gasp! divorce, prompting a scheme to win the neighbors over by having Noël Coward attend a Crawley dinner party—and several minor subplots, ranging from Mr. Carson's difficulty handing the reins over after finally retiring (I'm still "puzzled" about what happened to that palsy from the series 6 finale) to Alessandro Nivola as the world's most obvious flim-flam man (whose bones Lady Mary of course instantly jumps). As ever, nobody who isn't attached to these characters need go anywhere near the movie, which exists solely to give them another go-'round; at the same time, I appreciated Grand Finale's comparatively and counterintuitively light elegiac touch (at least until the very end, when poor Michelle Dockery has to trigger dead-character-and/or-actor flashbacks via a variety of broad facial expressions that call to mind a silent-era director shouting "Okay, now look wistful!"), with Lord Crawley accepting fairly quickly that the times they are a-changin' and exiting the Abbey (possibly for a London flat at some point!) in surprisingly good spirits. Mary's divorce inspiring Private Lives challenges Lorenz Hart's Stuart Little-inspiring mouse friend as the year's dumbest literary nudge in the ribs, and Arty Froushan's playing the popular conception of Noël Coward as saucy wit incarnate rather than a credible human being (small favors: at least Coward never dons a dressing gown here), but watching various snobs abandon their moral high dudgeon for a chance to meet the author of Hay Fever is still moderately amusing (and of course serves to make the Crawleys seem less obnoxiously hidebound by comparison). I'd have preferred to see Fellowes bring Siobhan Finneran back and have Mrs. O'Brien serial-kill much of the dramatis personae, but as needless formulaic extensions go, I've encountered much worse.