Love Affairs: The History of Sound and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. (Photo: MUBI.)

In The History of Sound Lionel Worthing and David White fall in love over a song. Drinking in a bar on a Saturday evening in 1917, Lionel (Paul Mescal) hears David (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student at the New England Conservatory of Music, play a plaintive folk ballad Lionel grew up with and drifts to the piano. David, an orphan who grew up in privilege in Newport, Rhode Island, is a competent musician whose passion for American folk obsesses him. Lionel is a singer whose gifts have taken him off the Kentucky farm where he grew up and all the way to Boston, and he knows at first hand most of the tunes David has been collecting in his brain. The night they meet, they play and sing until the bar closes; then Lionel walks David back to his apartment and they become lovers. After they graduate, David goes off to Europe to fight in the Great War while Lionel returns home to the farm and his family. When the war is over David takes a job as a music professor in Maine. He reaches out to Lionel, inviting him to join him on a trip through the forests and islands of the state recording music on wax cylinders to preserve it for posterity, and the two men pick up their relationship where they left off. But David is now prone to spells of melancholy, and after they leave each other at the end of their journey Lionel stops hearing from him. He continues to write monthly letters to him until he finally gives up trying, in 1921. It isn’t for years, after Lionel has become first a singer in a world-famous Italian choir and then, driven by his own unsettled nature, a choir director back in the States, that he finds out what happened to the man he fell in love with in that Boston bar.

This beautiful, understated, ineffably sad love tale, adapted by Ben Shattuck from stories in his collection, The History of Sound, isn’t much like any other movie I can think of except for parts of Living, which was directed by the same English filmmaker, Oliver Hermanus, in 2023. Living is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 Ikiru, in which a section head in the Tokyo city government discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. Struggling over how to make his final months meaningful, he arrives at a decision to cut through the inertia at his job and, against all odds, put through one beneficial piece of work, a children’s park in the middle of a slum. Ikiru is justifiably famous, but I think Living, which is set in London in the era when Ikiru was released and which attracted notice mostly for Bill Nighy’s sensational performance, is better. (The novelist Katzuo Ishiguro wrote the script.) Hermanus gets rid of the stock bits of romantic melodrama in Kurosawa’s version and expands on the characterizations of the supporting roles. The entire film has the dramatic integrity, for lack of a better phrase, of two classic sequences in Ikiru where the protagonist (Takashi Shimura). In one, early in the film, the protagonist gets drunk in a bar outside Tokyo and sings an old song he loves that comes out of his despair; in the other, at the end, a cop finds him alone in the park he’s managed to complete, swinging on a swing and intoning the song in the snow. His voice is reedy and hollowed out by his proximity to death, but instead of hopelessness you can hear peace and acceptance bound up in his sorrow. Hermanus reprises both these episodes masterfully but the narrative in which they are embedded is richer.

You can see why the man who wanted to remake these great scenes suffused with the emotional potency of music would want to film The History of Sound. What draws David to the wailing, woebegone music of the poor and disenfranchised singers he collects is that, stripped of the embellishments that formal training imposes, they are untrammeled feeling – the thing itself. They have the hardness of granite. And David is drawn to sorrow. He’s a loner whose feeling of dislocation in the world finds its reflection in his wartime experience. What he loves about Lionel is his a combination of his authenticity – he came out of the world David can only look and listen to from the outside and catalogue – and his understanding of music, which goes beyond the prodigious almost to the magical: even as a very young child he had the ability to hear all language through the medium of music. These virtues make him a born teacher. There’s a wonderful scene in which he talks to a group of children they encounter on their camping trip about music in terms that are clear and poetic and transformative. Josh O’Connor was so good as Prince Charles in the first two seasons of The Crown but his acting since then has been rather enigmatic. He was fascinating to watch opposite Mike Faist as a pair of tennis stars in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, but I couldn’t work out what the hell he was trying to convey. (To be fair, l found the whole movie impenetrable, including the sexual orientation of the two young men who, we’re apparently meant to believe, are rivals for the affections of the dull, irritating young woman played by Zendaya.) In The History of Sound the mystery of his character is layered, not opaque.

Lionel has the kind of access to his feelings that his lover lacks; when, during their travels in the woods, David asks him if he thinks there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing together in bed, Lionel answers without hesitation that he doesn’t. Shattuck may be suggesting that Lionel is a natural man, unhampered by the moral trappings of society. But the movie doesn’t reside in this cliché. Lionel’s restlessness dogs him; he’s not a tragic figure like David, but there’s nothing simple about him. Our sense of this character may have as much to do with Paul Mescal as to the way Hermanus shoots him. Mescal made an impression on me the first time I saw him, in a small part in The Lost Daughter, and I thought he was very moving as the suicidal father in Aftersun, but in All of Us Strangers he acted so ferociously that nothing he did seemed real. In The History of Sound I believed every word, and he’s so deeply in sync with Hermanus’s camera that it seems to be breathing with him.

Hermanus gets some lovely work out of Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge and Tom Nelis as Lionel’s parents and his grandfather. But O’Connor drops out of the movie halfway through, to return only in later in flashbacks, and dramatically the movie registers that loss: the scenes between Mescal and a woman he almost marries (Aedin Moloney) feel oddly incomplete. The film doesn’t get its groove back until those glimpses of David, brief as they are. Chris Cooper appears at the end as Lionel grown into old age. He’s superb, in a way that recalls Vanessa Redgrave’s indelible scene in the last minutes of Atonement, and this valedictory section is profoundly affecting.

From left: Nathan Hill, Laura Carmichael, Harry Hadden-Paton, Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Dockery in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. (Photo: Rory Mulvey, Focus Features LLC.)

Given the love affair of both English and American audiences with the television series Downton Abbey, you can hardly blame the writer, Julian Fellowes, for sticking with it as long as he has, over six seasons and three movie sequels. I’m not just talking about its commercial success; Fellowes created a large cast of greatly appealing characters, English aristocrats whose familiar world is fading – the first season began with the sinking of the Titanic and ended with the outbreak of the First World War – and their domestic staff. Audiences didn’t want to let them go; why would Fellowes? As a portrait of the relationship between masters and servants, the series built inventively on the well-loved Upstairs, Downstairs and it was more authentically detailed than Fellowes’s first attempt at this kind of high comedy, his screenplay for the 2001 Gosford Park, the virtues of which were mostly on the side of Robert Altman’s direction and the amazing ensemble. (I enjoy Gosford Park very much, but I always have a hard time getting over the stupidity of the Scotland Yard inspector, played by Stephen Fry, on the scene of Michael Gambon’s character’s murder, who doesn’t understand how much the servants on an English country estate know about the lives of their employers. He behaves like a novice. His dunderheaded interactions with the servants are obviously meant as class commentary but simply isn’t plausible.)

The Downton Abbey movie sequels aren’t of the same quality as the best episodes in the series, but I was happy to return to the company of the characters in the first one, released in 2019, four years after the TV show had concluded. The next one, Downton Abbey: A New Era, felt superfluous and tied up the various plot lines too neatly. But Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, which finally finishes up the narrative, is very sweet and quite touching. (Simon Curtis, who directed A New Era, did this one too.) It’s set in 1930 and focuses on the efforts of Lady Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery), whose father, Sir Robert Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), has given her the charge of the Downton estate, to navigate the family through the constraints of the early Depression era, as well as dealing with the social consequences of her divorce. Carson (Jim Carter), the long-time head butler, is living in retirement with his wife, Downton’s former head housekeeper Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), but still finds it difficult to divorce himself from the domestic proceedings. Not so Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), the cook, who is proud of her protégé, Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), and delighted to watch her take over the responsibilities of the Downton kitchen as she tackles her first challenge, a dinner party in honor of Noël Coward, whose West End triumph, Bitter Sweet, co-stars Guy Dexter (Dominic West). Dexter’s assistant/manager, Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), has a long history of employment in the Grantham house. Barrow is also Dexter’s partner; one of the incidental amusements of the movie is seeing the silent equanimity with which most of his former colleagues handle his homosexuality, a major sticking point during the series.

The actors are as welcome as always. The best performances are given by Dockery and the ineffable Penelope Wilton as Isobel Merton, whose son Matthew Crawley was Lady Mary’s first husband but died in an automobile accident early in their happy marriage. Dockery has some terrific scenes with Laura Carmichael as her sister Edith, a one-time adversary who has become a trusted confidante and has found a perfect match in Harry Hadden-Patton’s Bernie Hexham. Simon Russell Beale shows up in a kind of post-Jane Austen role as an insufferable snob and engages in some acceptable scenery chewing. The only actor one feels sorry for is the talented Alessandro Nivola, who’s stuck in the villain part, as a Yankee con artist who has been preying on the credulous brother (Paul Giamatti) of Robert’s wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern). (It doesn’t help that the audience figures out what he’s up to at least half an hour before the script divulges his scheme.)

The inclusion of Noël Coward (played by Arty Froushan as a sort of lark) provides an excuse to work references to several of his most famous plays into the plot. The picture opens with the family and the servants attending a performance of Bitter Sweet, where everyone falls in love with the ballad “I’ll See You Again.” (The rendition by Marilyn Cutts is indifferent, but it’s a great song.) We hear the real Coward on the soundtrack performing several of his other songs and one, “I’m Old-Fashioned,” by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer, which is so on the nose for the subject matter that the filmmakers must have figured they’d get by with an anachronism – the song was actually written in 1942. (Fred Astaire sang it in You Were Never Lovelier.)

The Grand Finale ends with a triple tribute to the three beloved characters it lost – Matthew (Dan Stevens), Mary’s other sister, Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay), a casualty of the influenza epidemic, and their grandmother, Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), who died onscreen a year before the actress herself left us. Other lovers of the series are sure to experience the same catch in the throat as I did at the unexpected glimpses of Matthew and Sybil. And, too, at the moment when Tom Branson (Allen Leach) – the socialist chauffeur whose marriage to Sybil caused such consternation early on but who went on to become a great friend and counselor to the whole family – whispers to Mary, in a farewell embrace, how proud her late sister would be of her. (Sybil’s untimely death especially lingered over the saga.)

The movie is dedicated, fittingly, to the irreplaceable Maggie Smith.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.