(Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer)
Spencer (2021)
(Now streaming on Hulu)
I was reluctant to see Spencer, the latest effort to summarize the fate and character of the late Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales (1961-1997). Since the flood of news stories in the wake of her tragic death, and the insightful portrayal of Diana’s struggles by Emma Corrin in Season 4 of The Crown, I couldn’t see what more needed to be told.
But maybe there’s a dimension to Diana’s story – rendered in stark closeup – that hasn’t been explored, or so Spencer’s director, Pablo Larrain, and screenwriter, Steven Knight, ask us to believe. The movie takes a deep dive not just into Diana’s personality but her nerve-endings. Larrain offered a similarly candid x-ray of Jacqueline Onassis’ simmering bitterness in Jackie (2016), with a piercing performance from Natalie Portman. That movie showed Jackie O over some years gathering strength to control her own narrative, not to be defined by the catastrophic events in her life.
Here, Diana’s conflicts certainly aren’t resolved, and ultimately all we get to witness is her fighting for – and, by the end, gaining – a bit more room to breathe. At the outset what’s most striking is hearing the star, Kristen Stewart, speak in a breathy, Monroe-like whisper. Even Diana’s voice sounds repressed. Something besides the beautiful pearls she wears has her by the throat.
Daringly, the script confines the action to three days in the early 1990s: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. The setting is Norfolk, at the vast Sandringham Estate, where the Queen and family gather for the holidays. Its enormous, elegant house and surrounding lands suitable for pheasant shooting make a lonely and forbidding retreat for Diana. We sense that quite a number of other short passages in her life might have revealed the same tensions we see here. These three days can stand in for many others.
As the movie opens, on the day before the Christmas festivities, Diana is lost, driving alone through the countryside. Amazingly, she’s ditched her security detail and has to stop at a roadside cafe to ask for directions, even though the Spencer family’s ancestral home, where Diana grew up, lies directly adjacent to Sandringham. The stunned diners are silent and meet the puzzled royal face with blank stares. They, and we, can see that Diana is off her game.
Once she arrives at the Windsor manse, the monarchical screws tighten. She’s rigorously scheduled, down to the pre-selected, carefully labeled outfits she’s commanded to wear: Christmas Eve Dinner, Christmas Day Breakfast, and so on. Variation from these wardrobe assignments is deeply frowned upon. As she ruefully points out, her dresses are “all set, as if everything’s already happened.”
(Charles, Prince of Wales (Jack Farthing) and Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) in Spencer)
She’s coldly chastised by her husband, Charles, Prince of Wales (Jack Farthing), for her chronic tardiness and her unwillingness, as he puts it, to be two people, one for the cameras and one for herself. Also, most cruelly, over breakfast he mocks her bulimia, the binging and purging disorder she suffers from. He clearly can’t grasp that Diana is trying to vomit up the hold his family has over her.
She has support downstairs, but even the staff wishes she’d stick to the royal prerogatives. Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall) has been assigned to help her follow the holiday rituals and reminds her that she’s chosen a life with responsibilities. The head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), assures her, his voice laced with compassion, that the serving staff likes her, wants her to succeed. They may ridicule the rest of the family, he points out, “but with you they do not laugh. They’re gentle with you. And they’re kind. And they are worried. They want you to survive. As the person you were when you first came here ten years ago.”
But it’s ten years later, and her role’s relentless formal demands, alongside her crumbling marriage, have grown unbearable for Diana. She moves into open, loud, even dangerous rebellion. She declines to join a family dinner, screeching in the hallway as she runs away, “Tell them I’m not well! Tell them I’m not at all well!”
Indeed, she isn’t. Her darkness deepens. The Major (inadvertently?) leaves for Diana a copy of a biography of Anne Boleyn. After perusing it, Diana begins to hallucinate Henry VIII’s ill-fated queen, envisioning her in full 16th-century regalia, bemoaning her fate, fearing her beheading. Is Diana facing a similar erasure? Would the royal family like to rid themselves of the troublemaker she’s become?
Fortunately, shortly after her arrival at Sandringham, she’s warmly embraced by her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), who are complaining about their cold rooms. Diana, too, is constantly asking for the gigantic house to be heated.
Her island of calm is the boys. Their love for her is unqualified, and bonding with them provides her with a measure of courage. Also, she doesn’t quite realize how steadfast an ally she has in her dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins). “They’re not all bad,” Maggie tries to convince Diana about the royal family.
(Diana (Kristen Stewart), Harry (Freddie Spry) and William (Jack Nielen) in Spencer)
Early Christmas morning she creeps into the boys’ room where they’re barely asleep — the room is cold! — and the three play a game called Soldier, where they must swear to tell each other the truth. William to Diana: What has made you sad, soldier? Diana to William: The past. William to Diana: I think it’s the present. Harry to Diana: I think it’s in the future.
Larrain has accomplished here what he also pulled off with Jackie, a largely impressionist movie. He doesn’t aim to be “objective”. The camera’s sharp angles, juxtaposed with stately, symmetrical compositions, provide no relief from Diana’s anxiety and distress. Except when she’s with the boys or Maggie, she can’t escape her isolation and despair.
When the shots begin to reel and tilt, they give a disjointed, “haunted house” air to both the Windsor mansion and the abandoned Spencer household. We’re seeing Diana’s mind fractured, splintered, imploding. Directors sometimes shoot this way to depict derangement or danger. But here a wealthy, privileged woman who’s luxuriously sheltered within a literal palace of order, can’t picture herself beyond the iron rigor. It will always be like this. It’s the order, precisely, that’s crushing her spirit.
Clare Mathon's cinematography is a marvel. Not unlike what happens in this season’s The Green Knight (directed by David Lowery, cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo), the camera imprints on our gaze Diana’s state of mind, not just an outer visual record. It’s as if the beleaguered Diana is aiming and focusing the camera, appealing to it to help tell the story she can’t find words for.
Jonny Greenwood’s mixed scoring — now floating jazz, now solemnly classical — roams the grand spectacle like a beast, poking and snarling at these regimented lives.
Stewart’s Diana is a remarkable creation. The actress shows us a woman coming apart, but she never lets us abandon Diana, even though, aside from her children, she finds few people who fully sympathize with her. Her gasping cries, frantic gestures, the anguish she can “explain” only obliquely, all twist and mangle Stewart’s astoundingly beautiful features. Diana’s prettiness and her pain are linked. Looking glamorous and dressing smashingly are another snare and delusion.
It’s a jolting performance but it’s rounded, filled-in, whole. We experience the same woman’s pain all the way through. Of course, we’re helped by knowing how matters will go in the future. Her glimpse of Charles’ lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles, after a church service portends the revenge and the easement she’ll one day seek and, to some degree, get. But our awareness of Diana’s future is double-edged. These unresponsive people won’t finally quash Diana, but we also know that, freed from the royal clutch, she won’t get time to build a full life outside the golden confinement.
But we do see her travails clearly, if only for three days. Within that short time span, Stewart creates a powerful rooting interest for a young mother. In no way do Larrain and Knight make Diana “heroic”. They’re simply saying that the woman had guts. Sometimes she might have been heaving them. But they were there, and she kept fighting for her singularity. The movie asks, who could judge her? Or more to the point, who had any right to?