Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, featuring Kristen Stewart as a tormented Princess of Wales on a Christmas holiday with the Royal Family at Sandringham House, is primarily of interest for the star’s transfixing performance as the put-upon noble who would rather be anywhere else than under sovereign imprisonment. Our never-ending fascination with the royals, as evidenced by the success of The Crown and the ill-begotten Diana: The Musical, suggests the Windsor well is far from dry. This time, though, it does seem such.
The fictional picture, a sort of madwoman’s personal diary, is billed as a “fable about a true tragedy.” The tragedy, it turns out, was not the one we expect—Princess Diana’s untimely death—but one of virtual captivity, a manner of death itself, slow and by a thousand stately cuts, perpetrated by iron-fisted control from a den of aristocratic vipers.
That’s the central idea behind Spencer, a film that gives us stunt casting in a regal Diana effectively played by the most unaffected of American actresses, and then spends nearly two hours hammering the same point—Diana was trapped, wanted out, was haunted by demons (including her own) and yearned to regain her personal identity (hence the title) while a prisoner to an institution determined to govern her every move. As the film asserts, there was no future for the People’s Princess in the Windsor family, only a present and past which were but the same.
Picture opens with Diana rebelling against security detail by speeding across the Norfolk countryside enroute to a Christmas holiday weekend at Sandringham House (shot in a German estate), not far from her childhood home. A tale of two houses, or two divergent lives, and a woman at a literal crossroads.
In the first of many digressions from royal dictates, she stops, alone, to get directions from a roadside restaurant before reacquainting herself with a scarecrow afield of her family’s former land. Exceedingly late, Diana is last to arrive at Sandringham in the first of many deliberate tardies which extend to joyless family photos and lavish Christmas dinner. She is instead content to wander the estate’s grounds, alone.
On arrival at Sandringham, she is forced to weigh in (a family tradition designed to ensure everyone gains over the holiday meals), and is kept under watch by the frightening, prying eyes of former Major Alistair Gregory (an excellent Timothy Spall), assigned to keep her in line and away from photographers who are “circling.” A sort of palace fixer with a rigid, microscopic control and mandate to keep the family free from press intrusions, Gregory has the curtains to Diana’s room promptly sewn shut.
With her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) crumbling and Camilla waiting in the wings (and gifted with an identical string of jumbo pearls), Diana clings to sons William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), whom she wishes to spare from the Royal Family’s indoctrination, including the armed tradition of pheasant hunting. She dives into a book about the tragic Ann Boleyn (Amy Manson), whom Diana considers a cautionary kindred spirit, roams Sandringham’s cavernous hallways in a funk and struggles mightily with bulimia.
Only dresser and friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins, warm) is able to get close, articulating that the Royal Family is unable to change, so any change will be up to Diana (an obvious conceit). Late in the picture a confessional scene between the women on a beach brings the film to dramatic life and gives it a lift, courtesy of Hawkins’s signature empathy.
The film manages a few salient observations on the trappings of royal notoriety and the need to be “two people” as Charles explains, and it does manage a great line when Queen Elizabeth II (Stella Gonet) advises the paparazzi-hounded princess that the only photo of consequence will be the one that will land on the banknote: “Then you will know you are currency.”
Spencer employs several effective visual metaphors to reflect its tragic heroine’s predicament, including an oddly surreal dinner sequence where a string of pearls snaps from Diana’s neck and, after landing in her soup, she promptly chews, swallows and then immediately vomits, suggesting the pressures contributing to her bulimic condition.
A few on-the-nose symbols include the “cold” rooms and lack of warmth at Sandringham; Diana framed directly behind an eight ball in a tense library confrontation with Charles; barbed wire surrounding the estate as if to suggest a prison camp; a scarecrow adorned with a weathered, worn Spencer family coat that must be mended; and a childhood home in disrepair, its stairs—to Diana’s adolescent room—in shambles.
These elements are effective. But as a story, with a screenplay by Steven Knight, Spencer is offers little new or that compelling, Larrain largely neutralizes drama in favor of an abstract, conceptual, dreamlike approach that, after awhile, yields diminishing returns. Too many times, after we already understand her issues, the film puts us into Diana’s headspace while Johnny Greenwood’s strident, dissonant music, meant to suggest an internal unease, blares on the soundtrack. At a certain tipping point the stylistic excess is alienating.
Larrain used a similar off-putting score by the talented Micah Levi in 2016’s Jackie, music that was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar and had the effect of pushing us away, rather than pulling us in. Yet unlike mournful Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as a bewildered Jackie Kennedy in the days following JFK’s assassination, Spencer is a more reductive and insular picture in narrative, approach and style.
Transcending Larrain’s fussiness is Stewart’s approximation of Diana, arrestingly executed and primed to land her an Oscar nod. Where the surrounding picture may be preciously stilted, it is easy to admire the star’s transformational commitment to states of depression, resistance and neurosis, often acting alone. The actress inspires curiosity and empathy for a woman whose story has been told, and told. One quibble—good as Stewart is, she employs a vocal affectation throughout, a sort of forceful, breathy whispering in nearly every scene. A curiously deliberate choice, it is distinctly stylized and does not suggest Princess Diana’s familiar, on record speaking voice.
Beyond Stewart’s performance, Spencer is dramatically inert. There are no defined acts to the screenplay, little character and much repetition to Diana’s troubles, all shot with a golden, gauzy hue. As a chamber piece mounted with superb art direction and cinematography (the opulence, décor, food, fabrics, gowns and landscapes are notably impressive) it has a certain grandeur but ends up telling us nothing we don’t already know—except that Stewart, the Cesar-winning American star, was able to pull it off.
2 1/2 stars.
