'Spencer' Reviews from the Telluride Film Festival

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We Live Entertainment Awards season is heating up, and yes, I fully realize that it is only September. However, I feel 100% confident in saying that Spencer is one of the year’s best films. As a filmmaker, Pablo Larraín’s work isn’t for everyone, but even if you don’t like his films, it is hard to deny that all of his projects have a very distinct look and style. Spencer is arguably Larraín’s most accessible work to date, yet I still believe it will divide audiences.

Spencer takes place over the course of three days. The film begins on Christmas Eve and ends on Boxing day. Diana, played brilliantly by Kristen Stewart, yearns to live the life she once lived before becoming the Princess of Wales. Over the next three days, we see how Diana is treated like a prisoner in her own home. Every single thing that she does is questioned or criticized. Every meal is planned, every outfit is picked out, and every room in the house is monitored. We see that Diana has reached her breaking point and is looking for a way out. Does it happen? Well, you need to see Spencer find out.

As a filmmaker and storyteller, Larraín isn’t afraid of challenging his audience and making them feel uncomfortable. Spencer is chock full of mood and atmosphere. The iconic Sandringham Estate serves as the setting for most of the film, but it is not the glorious residence that we as viewers know it as. Instead, Sandringham is a scary place. One that is cold and unpleasant. It functions like a factory where the same thing happens like clockwork, and everyone on the staff follows orders as though they are robots rather than human beings. It is the perfect setting for a horror movie, and ultimately Spencer is a horror movie.

Kudos to Steven Knight and Larraín for creating a film about Princess Diana that hasn’t been done before. I remember that before seeing this film, many people were comparing this film to Netflix’s The Crown. These two projects may focus on Princess Diana, but they are nothing alike. Spencer is a character study showing the dark side of being in the public eye, while The Crown is more traditional in its approach of highlighting the Diana that we know and love.

Kristen Stewart’s work as an actress is one that I have admired for years. Her early roles in films like Panic Room and Speak struck a chord with me, and I have been an avid supporter ever since. I say this because many people often claim that one can’t be critical if you like an actor, actress, or filmmaker. This isn’t the case with me. I can fully admit that not every film that Stewart has been in has been a home run. I thought Seberg was terrible and found Underwater to be serviceable as best. I have no problem admitting when something doesn’t work, even if I greatly admire the actor or filmmaker.

That being said, there will be no other performance this year that will be as good as Kristen Stewart is as Princess Diana. Stewart transforms into Princess Diana and not the Diana that we know from television, but a never-before-seen version that Knight and Larraín created in this film. Stewart plays the part perfectly. She makes the story of Diana her own as she disappears into this performance. As I said above, I have enjoyed the majority of Stewart’s filmography, but there isn’t any doubt in my mind that this is her crowning achievement. This masterclass in acting will be widely discussed and repeatedly celebrated over the next seven months.

This performance is special because it is very parallel to Stewart’s own life as an actress. You can see a lot of Kristen Stewart in Diana and vice versa. Stewart gives us an inside look into the mind of Diana and what it is like to live a life that is constantly being monitored and controlled by others. Stewart paints this intimate portrait of Princess Diana, one that stands out from any other interpretation that we’ve seen. We feel her pain and her frustration. Although she completely chose this life, we see that it is not exactly what she dreamed it would be.

There are several great scenes in Spencer that stand out. One of my favorites is when Diana sits at the dinner table and rips off her pearl necklace because she feels like it is choking her. We see the pearls break apart all over the table, and some of them go into her soup. Instead of picking them out, she proceeds to eat them. This is a horrifying scene to watch unfold, but it tells the viewer exactly how Diana is feeling at that moment. Another great scene involves Diana interacting with her two sons as they play pretend. This is one of the film’s lighter moments, but it showcases that Diana cares deeply about her sons and wants nothing more for them to live a normal life outside of the public eye.

While most of Spencer relies on Stewart’s performance, it should be noted that every actor who appears in the film is pretty terrific, even though most of them only have 5 to 10 minutes of screen time. Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins, and Jack Farthing appear and are pretty damn great. My favorite supporting role was Sally Hawkins as Maggie, one of the estate’s staff members. The chemistry between Stewart and Hawkins was spot-on, and I would love to see them together again in a future project.

The technical and artistic aspects of Spencer are just as impressive as the performances. The cinematography is stunning, the score is haunting, and the costumes are impeccable. I love the way that Larraín moves the camera and how he shoots. There are several wide shots and close-up shots, and each of them sets up the scene. There are also a lot of scenes where the camera sits there. These particular scenes make the viewer feel as though they are trapped in the room with Diana. They almost make you, as the viewer, feel claustrophobic.

Spencer lives up to the hype. This is a phenomenal film, and easily one of the best 2021 has to offer. Kristen Stewart delivers a tour-de-force performance that will undoubtedly result in an Oscar nomination. Spencer is the type of character study I love to see. One that challenges while being intoxicating. This is one of the few films that I seriously won’t mind talking about over and over again for the next seven months—Bravo to all involved.

THR (Scott Feinberg) For those of us who have admired the talents of Kristen Stewart since she was not yet even a teenager, it is a joy to be able to share that the 31-year-old’s portrayal of Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer — which had its world premiere at Venice on Friday and North American premiere at Telluride on Saturday — is truly the fulfillment of her tremendous promise and will almost certainly bring her the first Oscar nomination of her career.

Larrain previously directed another impressive film about an iconic 20th-century woman in crisis, 2016’s Jackie, imagining what life was like for Jacqueline Kennedy (played by Natalie Portman) behind closed doors in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Here, he focuses on Diana’s fragile mental state over a Christmas weekend 10 years into her relationship with Prince Charles, shortly before its termination.

Stewart brings as much to the part of Diana as any actress could. Donning spot-on costumes, hair and makeup, she nails the iconic royal’s accent, delivery, attitude, posture and mannerisms. And, frankly, she probably understands as well as any young woman alive today what it is like to constantly live under a microscope throughout one’s twenties, thanks to the sudden mega-stardom and paparazzi interest that came with the Twilight film franchise and her rumored relationship at the time with her co-star. (Diana didn’t have to deal with social media; Stewart did.)

Many are sick and tired of the British monarchy, what with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and The Crown and the tabloids. But those who take a chance on this film will find it an interesting addition to the conversation. As written by Steven Knight, Spencer is a blend of Hitchcock’s movies about haunted women. Like Rebecca, it features an aide who is meant to be helpful but actually drives the protagonist to the brink (Timothy Spall stands in for Judith Anderson‘s Mrs. Danvers); like Suspicion, it features a wife who believes her husband (Jack Farthing plays the cold and cheating Prince Charles) is actively working against her; and like Notorious, it features a problematic mother-in-law (Stella Gonet’s Queen Elizabeth II is as impenetrable as Leopoldine Konstantin‘s Madame Sebastian).

The film is introduced on-screen as “a fable from a true tragedy.” But it really is, as Tom Quinn, the chief of Spencer distributor Neon, put it during an introduction ahead of Saturday’s screening at the Galaxy Theatre in Telluride, a “ghost story,” albeit one with — spoiler alert — a happy ending, of sorts.

As was the case with Jackie, Spencer is so much about its central performance that Academy members may end up overlooking the broader writing, direction and picture, while nominating it for best actress, costume design (Jacqueline West) and original score (Jonny Greenwood) — and, in this case, perhaps cinematography (Claire Mathon) and makeup/hairstyling, too.

 LA Times Ah, what a joy to be back in packed theaters again, seated in the dark with strangers and collectively transfixed by the power of the moving image. Also, what a horror, what an utter creeping horror to think of all the invisible deadly pathogens potentially floating around us as we huddle shoulder-to-shoulder. Even here at this first Telluride Film Festival of the COVID-19 era, where vaccine and mask requirements are in full effect, taking your seat for a hotly anticipated title like “The Power of the Dog” or “King Richard” can induce a tremor of anxiety. Halfway through Saturday’s North American premiere of “Spencer,” the mesmerizing new drama starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, I was tempted to ask the fool in front of me to pull his mask up properly over his nose — only to catch myself and wonder if we were all fools for being there in the first place.

Maybe the huge crowd was getting to me: Fresh off its glowing reception overseas at the Venice International Film Festival, “Spencer” had packed an excited audience into a 500-seat theater, one of this small Colorado mountain town’s larger public venues. Or maybe it was the sheer relentless claustrophobia of the movie itself, boldly orchestrated by the Chilean director Pablo Larraín as a kind of biographical horror fantasia and companion piece to his equally hypnotic “Jackie.” That movie, starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, largely played out in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination; “Spencer,” which unfolds over a three-day Christmas celebration at the royal family’s Norfolk digs, also captures the end of a famously imperfect marriage.

That’s the conceit, anyway, of Steven Knight’s screenplay, which follows Diana as she chafes against her gilded cage over three torturous days. It’s a radical exercise in subjectivity, as the defiant princess is mostly isolated from the chief architects of her misery; Prince Charles and other members of the royal family are only glancingly seen, and Diana’s sole ally, besides young William and Harry, is a sympathetic maid (the excellent Sally Hawkins). The time frame is the early ’90s; Larraín has little interest in exact dates or other factual specifics, most of which would be superfluous anyway. “Spencer” wisely assumes we already know a lot of the ugly details.

Still, there are ugly details aplenty, like the expected but not overemphasized scenes of Diana binging and purging and flirting with self-harm. And there are gorgeous details, too, in the sumptuous swirl of the costumes and production design and the richly starched tones favored by the cinematographer Claire Mathon (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), whose camera chases after Diana down eerily empty palatial corridors and sometimes runs alongside her out in the open, in a few rare moments of liberated bliss. But if this is beautiful filmmaking, it is also slyly subversive of its own beauty, and of the ritualized pomp and formality that, for the free-spirited Diana, proved an intolerable substitute for a family’s love.

We watch movies about royalty, of course, to savor those rituals, to luxuriate in the gleaming spectacle of lives vastly more privileged than our own. In “Spencer,” those surface details quickly turn corrosive, none more so than a string of pearls that becomes an emblem of Diana’s loveless marriage, a choker in every sense. Stewart literalizes that metaphor still further with her breathy, increasingly frenzied delivery; for all the attention that her English accent has received, as an American actor’s English accent always will, it’s hardly the most significant aspect of her vocal stylization here.

A high-profile new Diana performance seems to materialize every year these days (“The Crown’s” excellent Emma Corrin will soon pass the baton to Elizabeth Debicki), and Stewart’s Diana may well stand out as one of the more divisive interpretations. That’s partly because the actor tends to divide moviegoers to begin with (especially those who haven’t bothered to see her superb work in Olivier Assayas’ ”Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper”), and skeptics may not be excited to hear that there’s as much of Stewart in this performance as there is of Diana herself. Locating an ideal balance between impeccable mimicry and her own personal experience as a much-hounded celebrity, Stewart turns even her own counterintuitive casting into a subtextual weapon. If she ever seems out of place in this lavishly appointed mausoleum, just imagine how Diana must have felt.

Like many prestige titles premiering at the major fall festivals in Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, “Spencer” (which Neon will release Nov. 5 in theaters) will receive an awards push heavily focused on its lead actor. It’s more than merited, not least because this is the rare picture in which the quality of the performance feels in sync with the quality of the filmmaking. Although the results aren’t quite as wire-to-wire impressive, Joe Wright’s elaborately staged “Cyrano,” adapted by Erica Schmidt from her own musical adaptation of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play, boasts enough virtuoso flourishes to feel like more than just an unadorned showcase for Peter Dinklage’s central performance.

BTLNews Chilean Director Pablo Larrain’s ability to portray the sorrow of tragic and well-known women was first revealed to audiences with 2016’s Jackie, about the unfortunate First Lady whose blood-stained pink dress seared her into our collective consciousness about tragedy. This year, Larrain has upped the ante by returning to the topic with a more modern and arguably more recognizable figure for today’s audiences—Lady Diana (née Spencer). 

In his latest film, Spencer, caught at the Telluride Film Festival, Larrain imagines, through Steven Knight’s imaginative script, what Diana’s last Christmas with the royals may have been like. To do so, he enlists the help of Kristen Stewart, a mega-star who has more than come into her own as an acting superpower and whose immersive embodiment of the doomed Princess places her squarely in the middle of awards conversation this season.

When Spencer begins, the haughty royals are preparing an extravagant but tasteful holiday season spanning from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, which they will spend at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. This much of the story is true to life, but, beyond those few seconds of realism, Spencer quickly and very obviously becomes a fairy tale of sorts, or perhaps even a ghost story. Diana is driving herself to the proceedings, late, disinterested, suffering. She is lost, so she stops at a diner for directions—turning the heads of the local peasant folk. She stops again, this time to dispossess a scarecrow in the middle of a vast field of his tattered red coat. None of this is subtle or, arguably, even needed—even the uninitiated surely know that Diana was immensely popular and also a bit eccentric. Knight’s and Larrain’s inability to resist hitting you over the head with it is the one dent in this film’s otherwise fine armor.

Diana eventually arrives (late — worth mentioning again, given the gravity of that offense to Britons, particularly royal ones). She is greeted by a stern equerry, Major Gregory, played by an even sterner Timothy Spall. She must be weighed—it’s a Windsor family tradition—to ensure she has gained the requisite three pounds by the end of the festivities. Whether this is true to life or not, your prying, googling minds will tell me, but suffice it to say that it becomes clear early on whose side of this ultimately bloody royal dispute the filmmakers are on.

Soon, though, the childish demeanor of the royals, Diana’s exaggerated insouciance, somehow recedes into the background. What captivates you, almost immediately, is the uncanny resemblance between Ms. Stewart—who looks absolutely nothing like Princess Diana—and the real deal. Call it the magic of the movies, or, more likely, the yet again magical work of two-time Academy Award-winning Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran. Stewart and Durran, with the aide of makeup and hairstylist Yakana Yoshihara (Murder On The Orient Express), can never fully convince you that you are not watching a performance, but they do convince you that you are watching the best ever yet such portrayal of the oft-staged Princess.

As the movie progresses, your admiration for Stewart’s performance will grow. Diana spends most of her holidays alone, roaming the estate grounds, the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallways. She does everything she can to avoid the dreaded, stuffy dinners, the unwanted hunting trips, the malicious scolding and stares she expects at tea or during dessert. Most of her interactions are with Major Gregory and with her official dresser Maggie (an underused Sally Hawkins), to whom she expresses her unhappiness and deepening depression, or with her two young boys, to whom she shows her unhappiness and deepening depression with every move. Larrain imagines that Diana spent this fateful weekend—when she had made clear her intent to divorce and perhaps destroy the Royal family—reading the biography of another ill-fated royal, Anne Boleyn.  Again, not subtle, but Diana is both so well-known and yet so mysterious that at the end of it all, one sort of admires Larrain’s vivid and somehow entirely plausible imagination.

As Diana continues to amble about the castle that Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas expertly reconstructed—sometimes floating, sometimes stumbling—the movie achieves its clearly desired effect. To feel, against your better instincts that notice her lavish gowns and boundless riches, a tremendous amount of sympathy and even pity for the woman. Despite her at times cool demeanor, she has a deep love for her sons, and an even deeper desire to escape the pit of her own darkness. But the royal gravity is too strong, the demands, whether conveyed through Gregory or by the Queen herself (here, played by Stella Gonet), are too magnetic.

And it always comes back to Stewart and to the tremendous assist she is given by Durran, who very well could be on track to pick up her third statuette. Ms. Stewart is, in a word, regal. Her beauty is sharper and perhaps even slimmer than the real Diana’s, but her look is identically pensive, moody, and forlorn. The wistfulness in her demeanor is so sincere and so persuasive that just by looking at her, you may be moved to tears. It is a physical performance through and through, one punctuated by Ms. Stewart’s trademarked writhing of the neck and tilting of the head. It is almost as she is squirming for her sanity while being driven insane by her suffering. And, because she does every one of these things with one or the other of the most recognizable dresses in Diana’s wardrobe, it really is just that much more convincing.

To all of this, add a somewhat bombastic but also tormented score by Jonny Greenwood, and the end result is another convincing and melancholic portrayal by Larrain of a woman widely believe to be both strong but feeble, determined but lost at sea. Who knows if any of this actually happened—strike that, a trip to KFC will make it clear that it probably didn’t. What matters is that Larrain combines such perfection in acting and story-rendering by his talented crew that by the time the Spencer credits roll, you will not only think it could have happened—you’ll desperately want to believe that it did.

Grade: A-