‘The Gilded Age’ Review: Dime-Store ‘Downton’
Ten years in the making, this Julian Fellowes period
drama set in New York is a pale echo of the original that inspired it.
By Mike
Hale
Jan. 23,
2022
The Gilded
Age
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/arts/television/the-gilded-age-review.html
Julian
Fellowes chased his new series, “The Gilded Age,” for a decade. Call it his
white whale. Beginning Monday on HBO, you can watch it drag him and a large,
talented cast beneath the waves.
What would
become “The Gilded Age” began in 2012 as Fellowes’s idea for a prequel to his
“Downton Abbey,” the upstairs-downstairs British costume drama that was a
monster hit for PBS in the United States. The early years of “Downton” were a
smooth, charming blend of family melodrama and pastoral comedy, but charm faded
and contrivance grew over the course of six seasons, and by the time the series
ended in 2015 the idea of a spinoff had lost some of its luster.
Fellowes
persisted, though, even as he wrote other series, like the highly entertaining
Georgian drama “Belgravia” (2020). “The Gilded Age” hung around, switched
networks (from NBC to HBO) and, when it finally started filming, underwent a
pandemic delay. After all that time, it’s sad to report that the show, while no
longer a “Downton” prequel, looks like a slacker and more superficial rehashing
of character types and situations familiar from the earlier series. (Five of
nine episodes were available.) Perhaps all that time had something to do with
it.
Set in New
York in 1882 (about 30 years after “Moby-Dick” was published there), the series
opens as a new-money family, the Russells, move into their Stanford
White-designed mansion on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the less
luxurious but more respectable house of the old-money sisters Agnes van Rhijn
(Christine Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).
George
Russell (Morgan Spector) is a Vanderbilt-style railroad tycoon and robber
baron, and his wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), is fiercely dedicated to forcing her
way into New York society. Their arriviste status is established right away,
with the appearance of wagons carrying crates of statuary presumably ransacked
from European homes and churches.
This is
Henry James and Edith Wharton territory, and Fellowes doesn’t shy away from
comparisons. A scene set at the Academy of Music, once New York’s primary opera
house, directly invokes Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence”; a scene in which a
mercenary suitor is sent packing is straight out of James’s “Washington Square”
and its theatrical adaptation, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s “The Heiress.”
And there
is an ingénue, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), the niece of Agnes and Ada, who
is reminiscent of many young women in James’s and Wharton’s novels, though
she’s neither as innocent, as tragic nor as compelling as those models. She
arrives at her aunts’ house to serve as audience surrogate and provide some
romantic interest in counterpoint to the genteel yet brutal social and economic
warfare that make up the central story. Through highly improbable
circumstances, she also brings with her an aspiring writer, Peggy Scott (Denée
Benton), a young Black woman who becomes Agnes’s secretary and allows Fellowes
to account for race alongside class and gender in his portrait of 19th-century
New York.
It’s a
muddled and slapdash portrait, though — a thin gloss on its superior sources
that consistently dips into caricature. Fellowes’s heart doesn’t seem to have
been in it; certainly his ear wasn’t: “They own the future, men like Mr.
Russell,” we’re told, and, “You’re a New Yorker now … and for a New Yorker anything
is possible,” and on the other hand, “You belong to old New York, my dear, and
don’t let anyone tell you different!”
The
shopworn dialogue jibes with the largely one-note characterizations, seen most
egregiously in the hidebound widow Agnes, who seems to have no thoughts beyond
her distaste for the nouveau riche. In general, the conservatism and
provincialism of the old guard is so overdrawn, and presented with such little
context, that the society women seem like they’re from outer space, and the
actresses playing them can’t do much to make them human.
One of the
glories of “Downton,” of course, was the excellence of its performers, many of
whom were not well known in the United States beforehand. For “The Gilded Age”
HBO has assembled a starrier cast, but most of the actors fall victim to the
obviousness of the material. Baranski’s usual brilliance is muffled; she’s the
designated zinger deliverer, like Maggie Smith in “Downton,” but the effect
isn’t there. Nixon tries hard but can’t find anything consistent to play in
Ada, who’s always on the verge of hysterical-spinster caricature. Bertha is a
slightly more rounded character — the story is generally more sympathetic to
the people of the future — but her grim social climbing isn’t that much more
interesting than Agnes’s snobbery, and Coon seems as uncomfortable as her
castmates. Other performers go straight to mugging, like Nathan Lane as the
social arbiter Ward McAllister.
There’s an
awful lot of talent onscreen, though, and some performers register in smaller
roles. Kelli O’Hara is good as a society wife trying desperately to straddle
the gap between old and new. Audra McDonald conveys strength and compassion as
Peggy’s concerned mother. And Sullivan Jones jolts the show to life in a brief
appearance as the editor of a Black newspaper that publishes Peggy’s writing.
In
“Downton,” Fellowes succeeded by cutting out the larger world and grounding his
story in the daily rhythms of one family and one estate. In “The Gilded Age” he
lets the world in, and yet everything seems smaller. The domestic workers go
through the same soap-opera motions we enjoyed in “Downton” but feel
superfluous to the story; New York’s social circle is called the 400, but here
it feels more like the 12 or 15. And while the costumes and interiors are
lavish, the Fifth Avenue streetscapes are now backlot constructions fleshed out
with computer graphics — you don’t even get the authentic glory of the manor
house. As the countess of Grantham said, things are different in America.
The Gilded Age review – Julian Fellowes’ stinky
rich New Yorkers are sheer agony
All of human life is here. Not in any credible way –
just here … The Gilded Age.
Forget Downton … here’s the new and definitely not improved
Brownstone Abbey – and these posh Americans spout nothing but drivel. Does
Fellowes actually write this stuff in his sleep?
Lucy Mangan
Lucy Mangan
@LucyMangan
Tue 25 Jan
2022 22.35 GMT
Boost your
vaccinations, don whatever PPE you have to hand – the new variant Julian
Fellowes has breached our shores. This time, his typing is set in late
19th-century New York. Yes, it’s Brownstone Abbey. Its official title is The
Gilded Age (Sky Atlantic), but we all know what we are dealing with. There are
posh people – the old families who have been in New York since it was a glint
in a Dutchman’s eye. Then there are the upstart types who made buckets of
stinky new money building railroads and are now busy building mansions all over
Manhattan and trying to lay down tracks into smart society. We’ll call them the
Shamderbilts. And then there are servants, who live beneath these posh people
and bitch about them whenever the restraining influence of the butler is
absent.
We lay our
scene in Central Park. It is 1882 it’s full of sheep. They turn and run from
the camera. It is a wise move, all things considered.
The first
note struck is a sorrowful one. Miss Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson, who is
still young and will survive the dialogue that is soon to come her way) learns
that the death of her father, Henry, has left her penniless and that she will
be thrown on the mercy of her two aunts. “Don’t worry, Mr Riggs,” she says,
smiling bravely at the handsome young solicitor who has had to break the news.
“I’m not beaten yet!” “At the risk of impertinence,” he replies, because
Fellowes knows “impertinence” is a very 1882 word, “I’d say you are a long way
from being beaten, Miss Brook.”
Get used to
this kind of drivelling redundancy, folks, because there is an awful lot of it.
Also, everyone is using that strange voice Americans do to indicate that they
are posh in the past – it mixes precise diction with a strained tone, as if
they are all having a hard time on the loo. Which, actually – well, never mind.
We needn’t labour the point.
Marian’s
aunts (or “auurahnts” as it is pronounced in 1882) are Cynthia Nixon as Ada
Brook, presumably as punishment for letting And Just Like That … go ahead, and
Christine Baranski – who must have a very persuasive agent – as Agnes van
Rhijn. ’Tis Agnes who holds the purse strings and is most conscious of the
standards to be upheld by her and her peers. She and they are aghast at the
arrival of the Russells. Mr George (Morgan Spector) is a robber baron (“I may
be a bastard, but you are a fool” is a thing he says) and has built his castle
opposite Agnes’s elegant home, much to her displeasure. His wife (Carrie Coon)
is a social climber who has her finger on the pulse. “We cannot succeed in this
town without Mrs Astor’s approval, I know that much,” she tells George when he
is taking a brief break from intimidating aldermen and crushing rivals under
the weight of his fortune.
All of
human life is here. Not in any credible way – just here. Marian acquires a
young black woman, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), as a friend on her journey to
her aaughuhaunts. She is taken on as a live-in secretary by Agnes so Fellowes
can develop as nuanced a portrait of race relations in turn-of-the-century New
York as he does of class. It is agony, but no more so than the rest.
There is a
younger set – indistinguishable apart from Agnes’s son Oscar and John Adams
(John Quincy Adams’s great-grandson, dontcha know), who have a shared feature
that will upset Mama no end when she finds out – who care not a jot for
convention, so that love across the new/old money divide can play out. “I only
ask that you never break your own moral code,” says Aunt Ada, whom I suspect
should not be allowed to cross Fifth Avenue unaided. “How wise, Aunt Ada!” says
Marian. I will have to look up whether taking the piss had been invented by
1882. And there are secrets among the servants. Miss Turner hates Mrs Russell
and is bidding for an affair with Mr Russell. The Van Rhijn butler Bannister
(Simon Jones) says he has nothing to hide, which makes me suspect he has
something to hide.
In short,
it’s just what HBO ordered from the man who by now is surely actually churning
this stuff out in his sleep rather than simply giving the faultless impression
of it.
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