Geraldine James

While the story of these striking seat-cover seamstresses is well worth telling (and sadly still relevant, given the need for last year’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act), screenwriter William Ivory and director Nigel Cole...do not tell it well.

Implications, about the long odds for romance, the deeper psychology of mating, and the devastating possibility that love isn’t an absolute but a willful, occasionally mutual, delusion.

Forgive me for suggesting that Conservative peer Fellowes—or, as he’s sometimes known, Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL—might consider Downton the cake he’s letting us eat.