Dragged by My Spouse to Downton Abbey (Yet Again)
Plus how it is and isn't like The Long Walk
When I wrote for a certain money-centric publication, I tried to use the headline above, as an angle for my review of the first Downton Abbey movie, which I was maritally obligated to attend (twice). My idea was to write a review specifically for people who knew nothing of the show, except what their significant other's fandom might have trickled down by osmosis. The [female] editor assigned was annoyed by this, and told me it was misogynist, which I think was more her issue than mine – I pointedly used the genderless term “spouse,” and can absolutely imagine couples in which a male is the dragger and/or a female is the draggee...or nonbinary folkx, while we're at it. I merely noted that in my particular personal case, the dragger was my wife.
Is it misandrist if she writes a piece about being dragged to Star Wars by me? Asking for a friend who is me.
Anyway, she didn't technically drag me to this one. Knowing how badly she wanted to see it, I found the earliest nearby screening and voluntarily took her this time (Side note: now that “preview” screenings start as early as 2 p.m. on a Thursday, can we stop pretending Friday is opening day?). But I have been dragged into Downton Abbey fandom, where I semi-grudgingly reside, having had to sit through most of the episodes multiple times. My reasons are personal – I spent approximately four years of my childhood living in a wing/former servant quarters of an estate in Ireland not unlike Downton in physical structure, though much of it was rented out, like our wing. The novelty of downstairs servant quarters is something I grew up around, and I will say there's something exciting, as a kid, to be in a house that can still offer surprise rooms you never knew existed before. But they were mostly run by rich dork heirs who impressed foreign women with their wallets, and wound up losing the rest in an era when divorce finally became legal and acceptable.
I wasn't that excited by the Upstairs-Downstairs manners-porn in Gosford Park, either. Then Julian Fellowes indulged them even further for Downton. By the time I was secondhand-seeing the show at home, my wife was watching them out of order, so it was even less compelling with storylines jumbled.
Is it wrong that I want a horror parody called Downton Stabby? Just curious.
By the time the first movie came out, though, I was up to speed enough, and had found characters within the soap-opera structure whose escapades I could reasonably appreciate. Now, somehow, we have a trilogy of movies, every one of which has served as an extended curtain call to give each remaining character a happy ending...or in the case of Maggie Smith's Violet, a grand cinematic death scene shortly before the actress herself would pass.
Can you or should you watch Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale if you have no prior experience with this franchise? I'd say probably not, unless you're a Noel Coward superfan – as played by Arty Froushan (Daredevil: Born Again, House of the Dragon) he has a significant role in the relatively low-stakes drama that unfolds, and he is as flamboyantly funny as one can get in a restrained costume flick. Again, the bulk of the movie is about happy endings for anyone who didn't clearly get one yet, and some who did already. The difficulty of making a movie out of a soap opera is that, to properly emulate its appeal, everyone must get a subplot, but they all must wrap up within two hours. That doesn't allow a whole lot of tension to build when there are a good dozen or so main characters in the cast.
The last two Downton movies had overarching arcs: in the first, the King arrives as a guest, and in the second, most of the major characters take a trip to France to answer inheritance questions. The major plot strands in this one are comparatively minor: in one, Mary (Michelle Dockery) finds herself divorced, and thus shockingly excluded from the fancy dinners she's used to; in another, her American uncle Harold (Paul Giamatti) arrives for a visit to reveal he has lost the family fortune, but has an advisor (Alessandro Nivola) in tow who might be able to save them, and/or serve as a convenient new love interest for Mary. Around the edges, Robert (Hugh Bonneville) must come to terms with retirement and the changes of the modern era.
Robert at one point quotes T.S. Eliot's famous line, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.” He's referring to people moving from houses into apartments, but he's also meta-referring to the franchise, going out with relatively low-stakes coziness rather than big-deal drama. Except that as my friend Franchise Fred likes to point out, no movie sequel that calls itself “final” has ever actually been the final one; typically, a perceived final episode draws even even jaded older fans, and turns such a profit that the studio won't let it die. Besides, it's not like anyone gets killed off. Irascible butler Carson (Jim Carter) retired at the end of the TV series because he was developing Parkinsonian symptoms, and the movies have simply ignored that completely and brought him back into action with nary a mention nor sign of ill health. Does he really retire for real this time? Even if the story says he does, you shouldn't count on it.
The principal conflict gets resolved by a ridiculous deus ex machina before it can go too far, with a magical plot-convenient character showing up suddenly to explain everything and promptly leave. That hardly matters – this is a comfort-food platter for longtime devotees, like whatever the adult equivalent is of Chickie Nuggies and Choccy Milk served on a silver platter with Grey Poupon and a bouillon spoon. Nobody's buying a ticket to see the Crawley family and their servants get challenged too roughly or face danger; they want to know that things work out okay in the end for their favorite TV characters, again. Not only is it not a spoiler to say they do, but it's probably a necessity, like revealing the cat doesn't die in Flow.
The movie budget allows for some flourishes like a neon-filled recreation of London's West End for the intro, along with a Citizen Kane-tribute tracking shot, albeit one that likely uses digital trickery that Orson Welles didn't have yet. Lighting takes more advantage of shadows than usual, and while the house itself remains the best prop, other setpieces like a local carnival get more exploration than a TV budget might try to hide. Writer Julian Fellowes uses footman-turned-screenwriter Molesley (Kevin Doyle) as a bit of a self-insert character at first, at one point having him literally address camera to proclaim that the writer is the most important person in a movie, though he later acknowledges that the actors matter too, by giving the words life. By the end he becomes more of a surrogate for today's struggling screenwriters – a wanna-be celebrity who must try to be content living a more normal life. I can relate, and felt my wife's knowing glance in those moments.
Yes, I teared up at the memory of Maggie Smith, who always added some much-needed meanness to the mix; I know not if I still will after the fourth or fifth time I'm forced to sit through this. Nevertheless, it's a pleasant enough confection, and that's all it's trying to be. At a time when reality really sucks, it's nice to imagine even a culturally stratified, white-privilege historical fantasy in which everyone is mostly good. Sure, it's mainly because they can afford to be, or so it seems, but in the modern era of billionaires who seem like they'd rather kick puppies than give us all health care, the Crawleys seem like a hopelessly romantic daydream of good elitism.
Meanwhile, if you want a movie that rubs the suckage of the world in your face, there's The Long Walk, a movie I've wanted to see made since I read the book. It's one of five that Stephen King wrote under the Richard Bachman pseudonym – another, The Running Man, with a very similar premise, also gets a movie this year and this season. Both books feel like Stephen King predicting reality TV: in The Running Man, which is quite different from the previous movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the contestant on a game show must become a literal fugitive and stay alive, as viewers win prizes for turning him in or even killing him. In The Long Walk, 100 young men (50 in the movie) must walk a lethal marathon in which stragglers are killed and it only ends when one contestant is left alive.
Endurance contests that dangle cash prizes to the poor and desperate are nothing new: They Shoot Horses, Don't They? chronicles a Depression-era dance-till-you-drop contest, while the documentary Hands on a Hard Body shows a similar real-life contest to win a truck by keeping your hand on it longer than anyone else. So far we've not had any IRL where death is a feature rather than a bug, but based on the sorts of comments we hear from the current government surrounding immigrants, those may be close.
For what it's worth, though, King based The Long Walk on the Vietnam draft, and its DNA is still there. My father, who was drafted, used to tell me stories about how his time in boot camp really taught him about class differences and struggles, and how he bonded with the Black draftees by getting drunker than them. In the conversations between the two leads, Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), who's White, and Peter McVries (Dune reference, maybe? If so it's unclear what the relevance is), a Black man played by David Jonsson, I see echoes of what my father was talking about. In a fascist dystopia, or so we're led to believe, anyway, neither is entirely privileged, but Ray learns just how much worse is it has been for Peter, and why the latter puts so much more effort into smiling and seeing the good in things.
Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence knows how to make movies about youths killing one another; here, the sheen is off and the ugliness – including one fairly explicit scene of walking diarrhea – is on full display. It's super-unfortunate, timing wise, that it comes out the week of a high-profile assassination, given the amount of kill shots to the head that are depicted. But then again, shootings are so common now that there's about a 50-50 chance ANY movie will be released right after one. The Long Walk suggests that keeping the killings state-sanctioned brings peace elsewhere, but it also throws in a touch of Fahrenheit 451 in the film's sole flashback, indicating that subversive books and music are banned.
What we see of the world is mostly empty, rural space, and hollowed out, decaying small towns; the rules of the game are that no spectators are allowed except anyone who already lives next to the road on which the walk takes place. When people do show up, it's usually to sit in silent tableaux, powerless to do anything but watch the death march that they all hope to participate in so at least they have a chance of winning. In an idea that Twisted Metal borrowed, the winner can get any single wish fulfilled, provided it doesn't interfere with the operations of government; unlike in Twisted Metal, the prize is legit...it's just that the cost isn't actually worth it, even for the winner. (That tracks with even lower-stakes reality – I happen to know Eddie McGee, winner of the first American Big Brother, and he said it was not worth it.) Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner never cut away from the walkers' perspectives to show life outside of it, or even the event's presentation on TV. The only nod we get to any theatricality is the supervising Major (Mark Hamill), a fascistic military enforcer who seems to be pointedly hamming it up for the cameras most of the time,
The Long Walk has been called unfilmable, for two reasons, only one of which is really of note. The first is youth deaths – Battle Royale was famously banned in the US after the Columbine shooting, but then The Hunger Games books took off, and soon everyone wanted their own version of that. Notably, though, the contestants in The Long Walk are young men, and only one is underage – they could be killed in a slasher movie, and it would be business as usual. It's more horrific here because we get to know most of them, but that's how Stephen King always works.
The second factor is that the book's ending was one untranslatable to film, featuring ambiguity that requires the reader to fill in the blanks, and likely to cause angry walkouts if filmed as written. Thankfully, a new ending has been crafted, and it works – it adds a satisfying final dramatic beat before adding an ambiguous post-note that evokes the page.
The walk we see in this movie may evoke echoes of the Vietnam draft still, but it's also very much the world today. The rat race, as it used to be called, that keeps us ever more tired and pushing until we collapse and die, while the leadership watches and only offers the nastiest of “encouragement” words to win at the expense of everyone else. It breaks most people eventually, and the only question is when and how. Right-wing Christian site Movieguide has therefore declared that the movie sounds like a call to Marxist revolution – because it suggests that rebelling against military dictatorships is bad? -- which may not be a bad thing if you're not deranged. I suppose it depends how literally you read the dictatorship. For what it's worth, the movie has removed the gay subtext subplot, because while you can show a guy murdered while taking a big runny dump, gay panic is too much for the studio heads, maybe.
I feared that I'd be exhausted by watching constant walking, but like the characters onscreen, I found myself diverted by their conversations. Like a good play, albeit one constantly changing its background scenery, The Long Walk depends upon your ability to enjoy the casual conversations of those about to die, even as they all think maybe it won't be them. Unlike in, say, most nuclear war movies, they do talk about more than just the danger at hand. They may not yet have developed the grim, tasteless jokes of seasoned military men, but they quickly evolve the camaraderie of your average war movie cast.
At the start of the walk, the movie feels like a drive-in style high-concept exploitation movie. By the end it's a bit more than that – a thesis on whether, in the face of darkness, it's best to put on a happy face as you keep going, or to choose anger and channel it righteously. Not to mention whether or not it's White privilege even to be ALLOWED to be angry, in a world that scapegoats the scary minority. In King's books, good usually triumphs with the help of good small-town values; one of the notable aspects of his Bachman books is that they don't end happily, even if the climaxes are occasionally satisfying in a grim way.
Is that what life is? We all end badly, one could argue. Downton Abbey suggests that a certain level of comfort can remain throughout, but both it and The Long Walk, in their own way, argue for that classic trope you hear people constantly joking about online.
Yes, whether your life is written by Stephen King or Julian Fellowes, the real life is indeed the friends you made along the way!
Ding ding ding ding DING ding, ding ding ding ding...doo doo doo doo doo....
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and The Long Walk are now playing in theaters. Images courtesy of Focus Features and Lionsgate.
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