For He’s a Julian Fellowes, or, What Kind of Suckers Are You People?

August 17 is the birthday of Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL (b. 1949), commonly known as Julian Fellowes by people who don’t have time to say all that.

As a history lover, and an American, I can’t help but have something of a love-hate relationship with the productions of this successful scribbler. I often love WHAT he chooses to write about or adapt, but I generally find myself disgruntled by HOW he does it. With millions following The Gilded Age at the present moment, this seemed like a good year to do at least a preliminary squib on him; I may go deeper into this or that aspect at a later date.

First: did you know that Julian Fellowes has nearly 70 screen screen credits as an actor (and as many theatrical ones) stretching all the way back to the mid-1970s? Fellowes was not a star nor even a well-known supporting player throughout most of that period, and he stopped acting soon after becoming a successful screenwriter, so one only becomes aware of his onscreen presence retroactively, but he was in many film and television projects that you are likely to have seen. He’s in major movies like Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985), Damage (1992), Shadowlands (1993), Jane Eyre (1996), and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997); telefilms like Noel Coward’s Present Laughter (1981, from a West End production), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess (1983), and Martin Chuzzlewit (1994); and he guest starred in episodes of tv shows like Tales of the Unexpected, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and Rumpole of the Bailey.

Fellowes’ first major writing project and by far my favorite of anything he’s put his hand to is Gosford Park (2001), a fascinating hybrid of his own consuming passions, and Robert Altman’s patented style of directing large ensembles of the English speaking world’s best actors and biggest stars. It’s Altman’s direction, the performances of the actors, and, as always, the gorgeous locations that are the biggest factors in my embrace of the movie, which I’ve surely seen a dozen times by now, but it has to be acknowledged that the architecture of the script, and the occasional line here there, are both characteristic of the writer and excellent, to boot. Best of all, the upper class characters are treated satirically. In time, that quality in his writing would seep away. I wrote much more about it here.

I also wrote a review of the musical Mary Poppins, which Fellowes wrote the book for, when it came to Broadway in 2004. You can read that here, although it makes no specific mention of Fellowes.

Fellowes has adapted and co-adapted many beloved authors over the decades, including Shakespeare, Thackeray,Wodehouse, Trollope, Agatha Christie, H.G. Wells, and Kenneth Grahame, and others. Haha, what a patriotic list of English authors! If Fellowes shares a foible with the greatest of them all (Billy Shakes) it’s what I would consider an untoward reverence for the institutions of the monarchy and the aristocracy. He’s no Christopher Guest, embarrassed by his title, reluctant to leverage it to advantage, and happy to cavort in the pigpen with the hoi poloi. No, instead, though his barony be but a dozen years old, and his wealth just a little older than that, he is an enthusiastic Tory to his bones.

One of the earliest clear products of that was The Young Victoria (2009), the purpose of which I’m not certain of, other than creating an opportunity for English audiences to worship their former Empress. Over the past decade or so there has been a floodtide of movies and tv series encouraging us to bend the knee to monarchs and the nobility. You want a list? The Queen (2006), The Tudors (2007-2010), Wolf Hall (2015-2024), The Crown (2016-2023), Victoria and Abdul (2017), all the ones about Elizabeth I, not to mention fantasies like Game of Thrones and Bridgerton, and worshipful ones about the continental likes of Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, the Medici, the Borgias, and such-like. People have always loved fairy tales and history plays and so forth, but this recent spate has felt like nothing so much as conditioning for the populace for being RULED BY THEIR BETTERS. And Americans have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, hence the political developments of the last decade. You DO see how this phenomenon is the opposite of the kind of stories that were being told during the Great Depression, do you not? Frank Capra,Clifford Odets, Charlie Chaplin, John Steinbeck? Not only has sympathy for the little guy evaporated, THERE ARE NO LITTLE GUYS BEING REPRESENTED. Or very few, at any rate, and fewer than that with any spirit or awareness of their plight.

Which is my lead-in to Downton Abbey (2010-15) and the subsequent movies. I was pretty much an unqualified fan of the series during its first season, and watched several seasons afterward, looking on in dismay as it unraveled into something quite preposterous. The virtues are obvious, the excellent casting, the terrific acting, the sets and the costumes. (Special shout out to Lesley Nicol as Mrs. Patmore, whom I got to interview in 2022)!

During the first season there had seemingly been a firm hand on the till. There was an awareness on the show that Edwardian culture was oppressive, in both senses of the word. It is interesting to me that the tone changed around the very same time that Fellowes himself became a member of the nobility. All of the sudden these lords and ladies became benevolent and wise pussycats and pushovers, and the servants were depicted as obedient worshippers of their generous overlords. See! The aristocracy isn’t so bad! The formerly socialist Irish chauffeur is even allowed to JOIN the upper class, and dutifully complies! Why, it’s the natural order of things!

My little squib about the Fellowes-scripted Titanic mini-series (2012) was still expecting the Fellowes of Gosford Park I reckon, which was not unlike James Cameron’s Titanic in humanizing the underclass, and holding the elite to account. In those days, the ’90s, and early oughts, democracy still sold tickets. But by 2012, the ship was drifting.

I liked aspects of The Chaperone, his 2018 film about Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) and her fictional chaperone (Elizabeth McGovern, who herself had played the beautiful wildcat Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime). I especially liked the fact that the story was being told at all. And yet… based on a novel by Lauren Moriarity (as opposed to actual events), it weirdly takes the part of the racist, prudish, judgmental chaperone rather than the point of view of Brooks herself. “See the fruits of hedonism?!” it seems to say, “If only Louise had listened to her elders, and hewed to the straight and narrow! Independence was her downfall!”

By now I was growing skeptical about any announced Fellowes’ project. So I had trepidation about The Gilded Age (2022) and was proved correct. We watched the first couple of episodes when the show launched, then rapidly dropped it. When we re-visited Newport a few months ago, we binged the whole series in preparation and have stayed with it since, in spite of the fact that the flaws that initially turned us off have remained. As always, I love the sets (real and simulated) and the costumes, and certain aspects of what Fellowes is doing. For the first time, however, I am not crazy about the cast. I find the character of George Russell particularly weak, both as written, and as acted by Morgan Spector. It fails both as history and as melodrama. He’s a Robber Baron? He certainly doesn’t act like one. He appears awfully serene and genteel for the kind of guy who supposedly made that fortune. Those guys, Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor, etc ate competitors and their own workers for breakfast and then spit out their bones. This “Robber Baron” flinches from mowing down his striking workers. That…would never happen. It’s a whitewashing of history, a papering over of events like the Haymarket Massacre.

The whole show is like this. It demonizes the crassness of the nouveau riche, celebrates old money, and at the first available opportunity manages to summon the British aristocracy to the rescue (yes, I know that subplot is based on real events, but c’mon). He has written a footman who loves serving his masters so much that he is reluctant to leave his job after making $300,000 (millions in today’s money) on an invention he has patented! Fellowes has written no fewer than three failed marriages into the plot in an era when NO ONE got divorced. Yes, again, one of those divorces is based on a true event, but it was a unicorn in its time. This was an era when people were religious. They married for life because they believed in heaven and hell — literally. Fellowes has characters behaving WAY more liberally towards those below them in the pecking order than they would have done. Way too warm and fuzzy.

The thing that bothers me the most about the show, however, is the nature of the dialogue. It feels intentionally dumbed down to me, as though Fellowes goes through his first drafts with a blue pencil and strikes out any interesting language or reasonably intelligent expression he might have accidentally committed to paper. I feel as though he is doing this out of a patronizing instinct that the American audience is stupid and borderline illiterate, which, granted, but THESE 19th CENTURY CHARACTERS ARE NOT. You ARE aware that Henry James was an American, are you not, Mr. Fellowes — I mean, your lordship? The average person of 150 years ago ran verbal rings around us moderns, and the script ought to be written that way. That’s just one of the many, many anachronisms having to do with customs and manners that are peppered throughout his scripts, each of which he writes personally. For me, it is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

BUT! I do love the care and attention put into the sets and costumes. The show is especially good at illustrating the gap between the stodgy, Victorian aesthetics of the old moneyed class vs. the ostentatious, flamboyant STRIVING styles favored by the up-and-comers. With that, he is of course, having another laugh on Americans, but he ain’t wrong. At this very moment, a boorish nouveau riche barbarian is planning a garish, ugly ballroom for the White House. Gilded Age, indeed.