A critic complained that an early P. G. Wodehouse novel had all of the usual Wodehouse characters under new names.  In the preface to “Summer Lightning” Wodehouse boasted that he had outsmarted that critic by populating the new book with the same characters under the exact same names.  The Downton Abbey movie does the same thing, but where Wodehouse ensnares his familiar characters in plots of ever-growing complexity and novelty, Julian Fellowes puts our old friends into situations that seem merely hard to believe.

Apart from two scenes of action and suspense carried out for questionable purposes, which we will get to in due course, the story is fairly thin material draped over the scaffolding of a visit to Downton in 1927 by King George V and Queen Mary.  We listen in to the witty conversation among the upper classes as they glide from dining room to drawing room to ballroom.  There are frequent interludes in dressing rooms as the upper classes rehabilitate.  The costume budget for this production must have been astronomical.

When the acidity (or vapidity) of the conversation from the toffs gets too strong, we are taken below stairs for comic relief supplied by the servants as they wrestle control of Downton from the insufferable staff of the royal household who plan to occupy Downton and manage its operation during the royal visit.  There are stately homes where the royal household staff can get away with this kind of thing.  They learned not to try it at Downton Abbey.

Tom Branson is a nice example of the tendency of the characters in this story to display fully formed the personality that was still developing during the TV series.  He is a man who fixes things.  When we first met him, he was a chauffeur, a man who could keep an engine ticking over.  That skill helped to move the plot along when the car of the village socialist with whom he had a romantic interlude broke down on a deserted road.  He happened to be passing by with a kit full of tools.

His skill with engines had broader implications.  He wanted to re-engineer the social and economic system of his time.  The Crawley daughter who married him, Sibyl, and the young socialist schoolteacher shared this ambition, which was part of the attraction he felt for each of them.  To be fair, Tom did go through a destructive phase.  Remember that at one time he helped to burn an Anglo-Irish family out of their castle.  The daughter of the family was a friend of Mary’s.  It took an intervention by the Home Secretary to settle things.

Put aside that one blemish on his record – a youthful indiscretion, no doubt the Inspector General of the day would have found no evidence of political bias – we can see that Tom’s penchant for fixing things has progressed from cars, to social systems, to the Downton farm, and has now reached the point where he fixes everything in sight.  He sees a distraught young woman sitting on a bench on Downton’s spacious grounds – plenty of room for multiple dramas to unfold concurrently.  She is unhappy in her marriage and stands, or to be accurate sits, at a crossroads.  Tom is able to dispense some sound advice to this unknown woman on the strength of which she decides to take control of her relationship with her difficult husband.  He has done his part to save the marriage of George and Mary’s only daughter (also named Mary).

Tom helps to resolve another subplot.  The Queen has a lady-in-waiting – I wonder if that means she was chief of staff, or social secretary, or simply a companion – who is a Crawley cousin.  She is quite wealthy, a widow with no children.  The Dowager Countess – Maggie Smith – wants that wealth to go to the Downton estate when the cousin, named Maud, dies.  Maud insists that she is going to leave her fortune to her maid, a young lady named Lucy.

Julian Fellowes allows the audience to deduce the true situation before it is revealed to any Downton characters.  No doubt most of the Downton gang would have figured it out for themselves had they the time, but they are busy with countless other tasks – looking down their noses, repartee, eating, dressing, what have you – while we in the audience have no other job than to sit back and put two together with two.

Isobel comes to the service of any audience members who failed to see that Lucy is Maud’s daughter, born out of wedlock. Isobel has demonstrated some growth since we last saw her on TV.  She has developed a sharp wit.  However, she remains a kind-hearted soul, so she aims her verbal missiles against Violet alone and does not direct them at innocent bystanders, as Violet and her granddaughter Mary have been known to do.

Isobel has remained the same in one respect: she cannot resist meddling in other people’s business in an effort to improve things.  Isobel visits Maud in Maud’s room, to let her know that she has figured out the Lucy mystery and is prepared to offer her vast resources of empathy to assist in any way.  So persuasive is Isobel, so clearly genuine in her concern, that Maud tells a near-stranger all the details of the secret that she has kept for Lucy’s entire life.  (She told Lucy when the lass turned 18.)  In 1927, a woman with a “natural” child would not be considered a suitable companion for the Queen, so Maud is risking everything by acknowledging the facts.  The conversation did not seem credible, but it’s necessary to the storytelling.  We need all of the audience members on board for the conclusion of this particular episode.

Maud is determined to leave her money to her daughter.  Once Violet learns Lucy’s story, she drops all objections about the inheritance.  You don’t have to tell Violet that blood is blood.  Yet, she does produce a sly smile when she sees that Tom is taken by Lucy’s humble background, her pleasant manner, and possibly other features that appeal to the superficial male.  Violet sees that the fortune that has slipped away may come back to the family a generation or two down the line.  An awful lot of things would have to go right for that to happen.  Perhaps Violet feels that her granddaughter Mary will be able to arrange it all in a couple of decades.  If Lucy and Tom have a daughter, she will be a distant cousin of Mary’s son George.  The relation is close enough to ensure frequent contact over the years ahead, yet sufficiently distant to avoid problems of consanguinity.  If the young lady will have him, I’m sure he will find her and her money very pleasant.  That’s a long way off.  Look for that story in Downton Abbey VII.

The main job of the other characters is to be themselves in vignettes that help us remember why we are so fond of them but that do little to develop character or storyline.  Robert remains the decent, upstanding, thick-headed titular head of the family.  The real work of managing Downton above stairs falls to his wife Cora, his mother Violet, and his eldest daughter Mary.

Mary must have Carson in charge of the staff for the royal visit and is able to magnify every flaw in Thomas’s stewardship – silver polishing not up to standard and running late, boiler repairs unsatisfactory – until she gets her way and Carson is brought out of retirement to take up the heavy burden of command.  Those sweets that Carson fed to Mary from the butler’s pantry when she was a child continue to pay dividends decades later.

However, Carson is as much a figurehead downstairs as Robert is in the main house (or as the King is in his government or in his family).  He is soon swept along in the rebellion staged by Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper (Carson’s spouse), Mrs. Patmore the cook, Anna Bates and others when the staff of the royal household make their move to take over the Downton operation during the royals’ time in residence.  Carson can lend tone with his perfect and imperturbable manners, but the real power below stairs is held by other hands.  When all the king’s men try to move in on Downton as they have on so many other fine establishments, the countercharge is led by the Hughes-Patmore-Bates troika who pull Mr. Carson along behind.  When the royal staff get their comeuppance, it reminded me of that moment in Lord of the Rings when Sauron realizes that he has allowed the One Ring to be marched right to the edge of the Cracks of Doom.

This light-hearted drawing-room comedy of manners above stairs combined with some broad physical humor from the staff is interrupted only twice by scenes of action.  At the beginning, Tom Branson singlehandedly stops an attempt to murder King George V.  That requires some running, manhandling, and subduing.  Later on, the police raid a gay dance club where Thomas (the butler) happens to be present.  Come to think of it, that incident also involves some running, manhandling, and subduing.

You wonder what the IRA (the ones in the movie, not the real ones) were trying to accomplish.  Why assassinate a constitutional monarch who was slightly more than a figurehead?  The king did not make British policy for Ireland.  The real-life IRA knew that.  The incident is fictional.  No one tried to assassinate George V in 1927 or any other time.

And what were the police (the ones in the movie and the real ones, too) trying to accomplish by raiding a club where no women were to be found?  On a business trip to London in the 1980s, I was invited by a member to a dinner at the Carlton Club.  I learned later that the Carlton’s membership is made up mostly of Tory party leaders, officials, and backbenchers, which explained the distinctly chilly reaction I got from the cabbie when I gave him the address.  Up until the election of Margaret Thatcher, this had been an exclusively male club.  They made an exception for her alone.  In 1927, I don’t think anyone at the Carlton was worried about a police raid, even though it was an all-male establishment.  Not so the men at the club where Thomas visited.  Yet all they were doing was drinking and talking, just as they do at the Carlton, and (unlike the Carlton) dancing.  Undoubtedly, some of the quiet conversations at the establishment in York that Thomas visited spoke of more intimate meetings to take place after closing (something that may also go on at the Carlton from time to time for all anyone knows). Hardly a sufficient threat to the public peace to divert police resources away from robbery, burglary, rape, and murder.

Thomas was a visitor at a gay night club in the city of York because, alone among the Downton servants, he had made a separate peace with a member of the royal household staff, a man named Richard Ellis, the king’s dresser.  Thomas is annoyed that he has been displaced by Carson and needs only the smallest excuse to leave the chaos of Downton.  The attraction he feels for Richard and the chance for an adventure provide the slight tug necessary to put Thomas and Richard on the road to York.

Richard has some family business to attend to and leaves Thomas at a pub for a few hours.  From there, Thomas is lured by a stranger to the dance club where he is caught in the police raid.

An arrest on a charge of this kind would have been ruinous at the time.  Thomas might well have been unemployable as a domestic servant, and he had no other qualifications.  Many British men saw their lives ruined in just this way.  Any number committed suicide, including Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computing, a man who broke the German Enigma code during World War II.  Incidentally, Turing’s portrait now appears on Britain’s 50-pound note.

When we recall that Thomas attempted suicide during the TV series and nearly succeeded, it is easy to imagine that he might have been tempted to make another try.  Fortunately, his new friend Richard is able to spring Thomas from jail.  Here is another incongruity in the story.  Once Richard figures out where Thomas is, he rushes to the York jail and flashes his royal household card before the desk sergeant.  The ploy works.  Thomas is released and, as far as we can tell, no record of the event remains at the police station.

It’s more likely that the sergeant had an existing relationship with the local press and had already given, or sold, the story to a local reporter of the arrest on a morals charge of a high-toned butler from one of the big Yorkshire estates.  Even if the sergeant is less opportunistic than that, how likely is it that a rank and file local official could be talked round by a high-hat member of the royal household, probably gay himself, who wants the sergeant to cook the books?  My advice – don’t bet on it.

But this is the movies, so it all works out.  As Richard and Thomas depart the station to drive away in Richard’s car, they wonder out loud if the day will ever come when people such as they will not be outside the law.  Nice of the writers to permit the audience a moment of self-satisfaction over this bit of progress.  Of course, the police and prosecutors are still persecuting people, but different people.

The final incongruity I’ll touch on belongs to Violet, the Dowager Countess. It appears that we have seen the last of Maggie Smith in this role.  She tells Mary, the descendant whose character and personality most resemble her own, that she has a fatal condition.  Is this because Maggie Smith and Julian Fellowes have had a falling out?  Or is Ms. Smith contemplating retirement? Or possibly, the Dowager Countess’ character has gotten out of hand and the task of producing verbal zingers for her to launch has become a chore, suggesting that the time has come for the Dowager Countess to step onto an ice floe and wave goodbye.

It’s the way she says goodbye that I found incongruous.  Violet is not a person who spends any time on introspection.  She has absorbed the standards, the prejudices, and the virtues of her social class so fully that she has no need to step outside herself to examine her role in life, much less how she and her peers (literally) fit into the broader scheme.  She is herself; others are themselves, and no further analysis is required.

Yet, when Mary expresses sympathy for Violet’s condition, we get one of those melodramatic “No, no my dear; don’t feel sorry for me” speeches.  Suddenly, Violet has become a dramaturge.  She professes that she has lived a life of comfort and privilege and is ready for the end.  Did Violet ever speak the word “privilege” in her life?  Perhaps when lecturing a social inferior, but never about herself.  When the great golfer Bobby Jones received a fatal diagnosis and a friend expressed sympathy, Jones said “We play the ball as it lies.”  I expect Violet, had she been allowed to stay in character, would have said “We’ll say no more about that.”

We are again leaving our characters in a condition as happy as could be expected under the circumstances.  As I noted at the end of the TV show, Britain at this point was just below the crest of the wave.  One of the greatest imperial enterprises the world has ever known was still enjoying a warm late summer with every confidence that the present state would continue indefinitely.  What lay ahead was depression, war, loss of empire, and loss of confidence.  I hope that Mr. Fellowes, having brought us this far, gives us a sequel or two (or more) so that we can see how the Crawleys, their friends and relations manage through the challenges to come.  In the meantime, he has given us two pleasant hours of diversion.