‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ Stumbles Over Inability To Give Lady Cora Crawley a Good Storyline
Since the very beginning of the series, Lady Cora Crawley has been a pillar of Downton Abbey despite that she has often played a supporting role to her husband, daughters, and mother-in-law. The newest entry in the series, Downton Abbey: A New Era, not only gives Cora little to do, but pulls an annoying attempt at drama in her name.
Spoilers for Downton Abbey: A New Era.
If you didn’t remember that Downton is, in many ways, a soap opera, the latest film will do its best to remind you. We find out that Lady Grantham, Violet, once had a brief but meaningful romance with a rich man in the South of France. As a result, he bought her a villa, which she decided to gift to her great-granddaughter Sybil in her will. Due to the wife of this rich man being very disturbed by this purchase, part of the family decides to travel to France to meet the strange owners of this villa. While they’re there, a movie is also being filmed at the estate. It is as thrilling as making soup, but I loved every moment of it.
We already spend the entire film with the tension of knowing that Lady Grantham will die after the events of the previous film. The entire thing is a one long funeral episode, but once we get to France, there is the added tension of Robert’s parentage being called into question. Once the dates are looked at, Robert was born almost exactly nine months after Violet’s aforementioned romance ended.
Robert panics over the idea of being half-French (he doesn’t even like garlic), and then we see Cora looking forlorn and concerned about something. Is it sadness over her dead daughter? Thinking about the time? Nope, she thinks she has cancer, which she breaks to Robert, who bursts into tears at the idea of losing his wife, his mother, and possibly his name. I have always loved Cora and have felt like she has often been forced to swallow her own feelings for Robert’s sake, especially when Lady Sybil died. To have the only thing she contributes to this movie be the haunting idea that she might also die and make Robert sad is awful.
Awful writing. Cora is the lady of the house. Her mother-in-law is about to die. Rather than be put in any storyline that establishes her as a certain figure in Downton, especially as the main reason it is still financially standing, she just gets a fake cancer scare. She just ends up having acute anemia. It’s not great, but it allows Robert to rest easy as his mother dies, but not before reassuring him he is as English as they come.
I appreciate that New Era is a “feel good movie.” We are in the worst timeline, and it is nice to watch something like Downton Abbey where the stakes are literally as low as they come. But please, for the love of everyone, if you can’t give a decent storyline to a major character like Cora, can we at least not pretend we are gonna kill her off?
In an interview with Julian Fellowes, he says of the future of Downton Abbey, “I don’t really know the answer to that, because it’s the public that tells you if they want to see you again. I feel my duty now is sort of, at the end of every movie in the last couple of years, to structure it so that, if that is the end, then it’s okay. But I wouldn’t necessarily say we’ll never be back, because as long as the cast wants to come back every two or three years, and spend eight weeks catching up with each other, and if the public wants that…[trails off]. There’s no natural finite moment to a drama that is based on a family any more than there’s any finite moment with one’s own family.”
We may have lost Violet, but there may be room for more Downton—maybe even one where Mary’s husband shows up.
(featured image: Focus Features)
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