Butler's Cinema Scene

“DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA” My rating: B (Theaters)

125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

The chickens — every last one of them — have come home to roost by the time “Downton Abbey: The New Era” wraps up the saga of the Grantham clan.

Seriously, folks, there are at least a dozen or so mini-plots playing out against the two main narratives in Julian Fellows’ screenplay…just about every character gets his/her moment in the spotlight before bringing down the curtain.

On one level it’s ridiculous…like watching a stage juggler keep a dozen balls in the air while doing a tap dance on one leg and singing “Old MacDonald” in Farsi. At the same time you have to admire the craftsmanship that keeps it all from descending into pure chaos.

Fans of the PBS series and the previous film entry will be beside themselves.

The film begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. By the time it’s over just about every character is domestically settled (if not in a conventional marriage then in an appropriate arrangement for the personalities in question).

Two big plots here. No. 1: Downton Abbey becomes a movie studio. No. 2: Half the clan heads off to the South of France to explore a new addition to the family holdings and poke around in unexplored Grantham history.

First, the movie narrative. Seems Downton has a very leaky and expensive roof to repair. When movie director Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy) proposes spending a small fortune for the right to film a motion picture at the abbey, the Granthams swallow their uneasiness about actors (you know, women plastered in makeup and men just plastered) and assent.

At the same time, dowager Violet (Maggie Smith) is informed that a French gentleman she knew as a young bride (we’re talking 1864…the Lincoln administration) has died and left her his estate on the Riviera. So a delegation of family and staff invade the Continent…they can check out the new digs while avoiding the chaos generated by those “movie people” back home.

So basically you’ve got two films that come together at the end.

The one set in England is a riff on “Singin’ in the Rain.” The movie crew are shooting a silent feature, but “The Jazz Singer” has just opened and halfway through filming the movie must convert to sound. (The time appears to be 1928…the Great Depression has not yet reared its ugly head.)

This poses problems for the movie-in-a-movie’s leading lady, Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), who dominates the screen with her cool beauty but in real life is an angry/insecure diva who speaks in a Cockney bray. At this point Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), who has stayed behind to hold the fort, discovers she has a talent for voiceover work. At the same time cinema-crazed former footman Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) uses his previously useless knowledge of literature to knock out desperately needed original dialogue for the actors.

Oh, yes, the male lead of the movie being shot is swashbuckling star Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who takes a shine (ahem) to the chief butler, Mr. Barrow (Robert James-Collier), who we learned in the earlier “Downton” movie bats for the other team.

And I haven’t even mentioned the simmering attraction between Dancy’s character and Lady Mary, whose husband (a race car driver played in the previous film by Matthew Goode) is off gallivanting abroad and never seen.

Meanwhile in France, Robert Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) begins to suspect that he is the offspring of an illicit dalliance between his mother and that now-deceased French fellow, whose widow (the great Nathalie Bay, here criminally underused) is incensed about losing her winter palace to a pack of stuffy Brits. But her son (Alex Skarbek) is more welcoming; he believes that Robert is his half brother.

Whoo-hooo! Dirty family laundry!

There are also minor (very minor) conundrums among the abbey staff and various far-flung Grantham relations and acquaintances.

To ensure lots of screen time for everyone in the massive cast (many of whom saw their story arcs resolved in the last movie and have little to do in this one), director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn,” “Woman in Gold”) breaks even the most banal conversation into a series of quick-cut reaction shots so as to register the faces of surrounding cast members. That way everyone gets screen time. It’s like “My Dinner with Andre” filmed like an action sequence.

Silly? Yes. Are we painfully aware of all the seams and cut-and-paste moments in the narrative? Yep.

Does it matter? Probably not. “Downton Abbey: The New Era” is like attending a reunion with people we all know well and whose company, foibles and all, we relish.

Not to mention the costumes and castles.

| Robert W. Butler

“THE INNOCENTS”: My rating: B (On Demand)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most of us are sentimental slobs when it comes to kids, telling ourselves that children are — up to a certain age, anyway — blemish free. They’ve not yet discovered the possibility of evil.

The ironically-titled “The Innocents” isn’t having any of that.

This weriting/directing effort from Eskil Vogt (screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated “The Worst Person in the World”) makes a case that the demons of cruelty and destruction inhabit even the youngest of us.

It’s not a comforting thought, but it makes for a majorly creepy movie, thanks to four astonishing performances by child actors.

Little Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her parents and her profoundly autistic older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) have just moved into a high-rise apartment building in the wooded suburbs of a Norwegian city. The speechless Anna requires so much attention that the unsupervised Ida is left to her own devices.

Almost immediately she finds a new playmate in Ben (Sam Ashraf), a boy several years her senior.

Ben apparently has no friends his own age; indeed, he’s regularly bullied by older kids hanging around the complex.

But he does have unusual skills. Ben demonstrates his ability to move small objects — a bottle cap, for example — using only his mind. Of course he also has a thing for torturing and killing animals.

Apparently he’s not alone in having unusual powers. Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), another girl Ida’s age, has her own eerie skill set. Whereas Ben exhibits a sadistic streak, Aisha exudes charity. She silently focuses on Ida’s big sister Anna, who subsequently shows signs of breaking out of her catatonic bubble and actually communicating with the world beyond her head.

To a large extent “The Innocents” takes Ida’s point of view. She matter-of-factly accepts these supernatural events without comment or analysis; she makes no moral judgment on Ben’s clearly psychotic behavior.

But at a certain point the boy’s powers increase to match his pathology; he’ll move from tormenting animals to attacking the older kids and adults who have made his life miserable. What’s a little girl to do?

Vogt doesn’t attempt to explain how these children developed weird skills. Why they developed them, though, may be inferred from their status as victims. Ben and Aisha are dealing with bullying and racial bigotry (both are of Middle Eastern descent in a world of pink-cheeked blondes), and all three have reason to resent their parents.

Grownups here are viewed mostly as background figures…we’re halfway through the film before one of them is seen in closeup. And the adults have no idea of the black magic unfolding around them.

I mean, these are just kids, right?

| Robert W. Butler

“THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES” My rating: B+ (Netflix)

After viewing the six one-hour episodes that make up Netflix’s “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” I’m not sure I’m any closer to knowing Warhol as a person.

But I’m a lot closer — invested, even — in the mystery.

Let’s say from the outset that this Andrew Rossi-directed documentary series is not a survey course on all things Warhol.  If you’re an art newbie wanting to know what all the fuss was about in an easily digested format, look elsewhere.

You’ll  see lots of his paintings, of course, but this show doesn’t take the art-history approach. Music geeks should note that there’s  no mention of Warhol’s involvement with the seminal rock group the Velvet Underground. Nor is there an attempt to analyze his cinematic output.

The focus here is on Warhol’s interpersonal relationships as revealed in his posthumously published (in 1989) diary, which covered approximately the last decade of his life. One assumes (hopes) that Warhol was being honest in these entries, but there are moments — usually traumatic — when he simply says he’s not going to write about that.

The diary entries are read here by actor Bill Irwin, whose voice has been electronically augmented to mimic Warhol’s.  The results are eerily realistic. Irwin’s approach is appropriately  deadpan; he often ends a sentence on a rising note that suggests a tentative question mark.  Anyway, it sounds just like Andy.

There are dozens of interviews with Warhol friends and associates, critics and others.  And the series offers an unbelievable collection of Warhol film, video and still photos.  Despite his professed shyness,  the man was a publicity whore who over years fashioned his own oddball persona and played the media masterfully.

And yet when it’s all over, Andy Warhol eludes our attempts to pin him down.

Take, for example, the matter of Warhol’s sexuality.  He was queer, but not openly so (he grew  up Catholic in a Slavic enclave in 1940s Pittsburgh; conditioned with nagging inhibitions, he wasn’t  about to go public with his homosexuality).  One assumes that he engaged in sexual relations…but we cannot be sure.  He once dismissed sex as “too messy” to be bothered with.  He shared a bedroom with one of  his lovers, but for all we know it may have been a chaste arrangement.

Throughout the series we witness Warhol being pulled in two directions.  On the one hand, he was reluctant to open himself up emotionally, and this reticence seems to have led to a major breakup.  On the other, the diaries reveal a painfully lonely individual who partied all night at Studio 54, then retreated to the loneliness of his bed. Like just about everyone else, Andy Warhol wanted to be loved.

The first episode in the series lays out the broad strokes of Warhol’s life and career.  The next two center on two men he loved.

Jed Johnson was boy-next-door handsome and met Warhol when he made a delivery to the artist’s famous Factory in NYC; he ended up doing odd jobs around the place and eventually moved in with his boss.

“Nice guy” doesn’t begin to cover Johnson’s positive attributes. He was tremendously loyal to Warhol and had a calming effect on the artist; everyone who knew him seems to have loved him. He started his own interior design business and became a huge success.  Apparently, though, he wanted more from the relationship than Warhol was willing to give.  He became the artists’s great lost love.

Then there’s Jon Gould, a movie studio executive. He, too, was very handsome, and much younger than Warhol.   Again, an all-around nice guy, though apparently more interested in Warhol as a friend than a lover.

Tragically, he died of AIDS at age 33, shortly after abandoning Warhol and life in New York.

Weird note:  Both Jed Johnson and Jon Gould have identical twin brothers who are interviewed for the doc.

Another episode centers on Jean-Michel Basquiat, the young cutting-edge artist befriended by Warhol and with whom he enjoyed a productive artistic collaboration.

Given that Warhol’s essence seems perennially out of reach, is it worth devoting six hours to an epic case of head-scratching? To a mystery with no answer?

Yeah, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” isn’t for everybody. But I don’t regret a minute of the time devoted to watching the documentary. As a time machine into 70s and 80s Manhattan the enterprise is hugely seductive, and in the end I found myself viewing Warhol with unexpected affection.

There’s plenty of eye-catching art here, but in the end, Warhol was his own greatest creation. 

| Robert W. Butler