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Variety "Spencer,” Pablo Larraín’s magnificent movie about Princess Diana and how she freed herself from the life she chose, the life that made her a star, and the life that was killing her, opens with a sequence that’s staged, with a deadpan wink, to look like a thriller. At the Sandringham Estate, a preposterously large six-story country mansion that stands on 20,000 acres of the Norfolk Coast, a military convoy arrives, toting crates that look like they must contain oversize weapons. But no, they’re just carrying food — cascades of fruit and vegetables, lobsters the size of AK-47s. It’s all in preparation for the three-day Christmas weekend, which the British royal family will be spending at Sandringham. The consumption of food — fresh, sweet, savory, luscious, opulent in its abundance — will be at the center of the festivities. As the cooks come in, they, too, walk in formation, and the film crosscuts between these paramilitary kitchen rituals and the sight of a sporty little green car tooling through the countryside. It’s being driven by Diana (Kristen Stewart), the Princess of Wales, and the fact that she’s on her own is no accident. The weekend hasn’t even begun, and already the film is letting us know two things: that she’s breaking away, and that she’s lost.
Literally lost. “Where the fuck am I?” says Diana, trying to hold up a map as she drives. She should probably know; it’s her old neighborhood — the place where she grew up, just a mile or two from Sandringham. But she’s out of sorts now; she has misplaced her spiritual compass. So she stops at a petrol station and walks into the café to ask for help. It’s a comic situation, since Diana, in a red-and-green plaid jacket that looks like it must be Chanel, knows that wherever she goes she’ll be greeted as who she is: the most famous and idolized woman in the world. “Excuse me,” she says to no one in particular. “I’m looking for somewhere. I have absolutely no idea where I am.” That statement can be read on a deep level. For the moment, though, what we’re looking at, and listening to, is Kristen Stewart, and hearing her say those lines gives you a tingle. The words are soft and satiny, but they tumble out in a whispery rush, a burst of girlish sincerity that’s at once imperious and coquettish. Di, we can see, is commanding the room, feeling the power that’s there in her. She also looks like she wants to melt away.
And here’s the beauty part: Right off, we feel as if we’re seeing…Diana. The real thing. Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma. Watching her play Diana, we see an echo, perhaps, of Stewart’s own ambivalent relationship to stardom — the way that she’ll stand on an awards podium, chewing her lip, reveling in the attention even as she’s slightly uncomfortable with it (and even as she makes that distrust of the limelight a key element of her stardom). Mostly, though, what we see in Stewart’s Diana is a woman of homegrown elegance, with a luminosity that pours out of her, except that part of her is now driven to crush that radiance, because her life has become a wreck.
“Spencer” is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s “Jackie,” the 2016 drama in which Natalie Portman brilliantly portrayed Jackie Kennedy during the week following the JFK assassination. I thought “Jackie” was a knockout, and “Spencer,” which also finds its heroine living through a fateful moment of truth and transition, is every bit as good; it may be even better. The entire film is set over the Christmas holiday, about 10 years after the 1981 wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, and it takes the form of a you are-there voyeuristic diary of what Diana was going through as she came to realize that her disenchantment with her life had become defining, consuming.
In the movie, we see a princess, a woman of power and true majesty, who is treated like a child. Major Gregory, played by a disarmingly gaunt and severe-looking Timothy Spall, has been brought onto the premises to keep an eye on her, and his watchful gaze makes her feel like a pinned insect. And Diana’s lady-in-waiting, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is her one trusted confidante — but for that very reason, Maggie gets sent away. There can be no secrets. And there are none. At Sandringham, the walls have ears.
“Spencer” is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance. The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes — the patterned curtains and gilded wallpaper, the carved paneling, the warm light of the chandeliers, the paintings and upholstery and mirrors and knickknacks. And Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions. Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining,” though part of what’s bracing about the movie is that the members of the royal family have come to think it’s Diana who’s the monster. They regard the attention she receives as a threat to who they are, and they’re right. What they’re in denial of is that the media is creating a new world that’s going to squeeze them out.
No one forced Diana, of course, to become one of the royals. In the eyes of the world, she’s living the dream. She had turned into our real-life media-age Cinderella. But “Spencer” is a film with the daring, and the imagination, to portray Diana not as a “princess,” or as a rebel princess either, but as the idiosyncratic flesh-and-blood woman she was, and the movie creates a kind of dream projection of her inner life.
Yes, she has wealth, comfort, privilege, fame. But life within the gilded cage of the royal family is also stifling. As she explains to her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), that’s because it’s a life that makes time stand still. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.” What she’s talking about is an existence in which “tradition” is code for what has been, and what always will be. (It’s code for a very British kind of control.) There is no room for anything that isn’t tradition. The film presents Diana’s bulimia with disarming frankness (it’s an open secret that even Charles makes scornful reference to), but part of the drama of how it’s portrayed is that it’s not just an “eating disorder.” It’s Diana’s way of rejecting the food porn that’s part of what the royals use to numb themselves.
As “Spencer” presents it, Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick of a man who openly betrays her. Not an uncommon situation. But since she’s one of the royals, she cannot leave him (or so she thinks). She’s effectively imprisoned. She knows she’s supposed to wear the gorgeous pearl necklace that Charles got her, but he also got the same necklace for her — for his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who we glimpse outside the church on Christmas morning; she gives Diana a grin of malice). He did it thoughtlessly, not even realizing that anyone would notice. (Unlike Diana, he’s got a pre-media mind.) In her bedroom at the mansion, Diana finds a biography of Anne Boleyn, the wife that Henry VIII accused of adultery and beheaded so that he could marry someone else, and she begins to feel Boleyn as a kindred spirit. Larraín stages an extraordinary dinner scene in which Diana takes in the stares of Charles, the Queen, and others who have begun to register that she’s “cracking up.” Their attitude is: How do you solve a problem like Diana? But Diana grabs the pearls around her neck as if the necklace itself were about to execute her. Those pearls are killing her softly.
For decades now, what we think of as the “Masterpiece Theatre” genre has made a kind of deal with adult moviegoers. Starting in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when it rose in tandem with high-concept fantasy culture, the British period-piece costume drama has said to its audience, “Forget the blockbuster noise! Here’s a movie in which you’ll get to experience sparkling dialogue, as well as genuine interaction between people.” In that light, part of the audacity of “Spencer” is that, in spirit and form, it’s a kind of “Masterpiece Theatre” movie, except that the nimble conversation that’s the lifeblood of these films — or, indeed, of “The Crown” — is denied to Diana. That’s right: The royal family is too boring to even talk very much. Yet the script, by Steven Knight (“Locke”), creates its own alluring cleverness. It’s there in Diana’s dialogue, which consists of her spewing out observations, to others but almost to herself, with a kind of rueful mockery. “This was once Queen Victoria’s room,” she says of her bedroom. “So it will have her skin floating in the air.” More tragically, she says, referring to own incandescence, “Beauty is useless. Beauty is clothing.” The movie shows you that she has come to believe that.
How will Diana escape? For most of the movie, she has no idea that she can. But an encounter with a scarecrow, nicknamed Bertie, that she remembers from her youth, when she was Diana Spencer, sets off something in her. She goes to visit her old house, which is all boarded up, and she realizes that she was more of herself back then than she is now. That said, in all the conflicts she has with Charles, who is played by Jack Farthing as a man of brutal limitation, there’s one that she’s driven not to compromise on: She does not want her sons to become part of their father’s pheasant-hunting brigade. She says it’s dangerous. She’s right, but the real problem is what she won’t say: that she feels like she’s one of the pheasants, and that the habit of hunting, and the way that it’s linked to the royals’ tradition of “military” discipline (though a real soldier doesn’t get his prey paraded right in front of him), incarnates everything that’s wrong with them.
So the day after Christmas, she drives out to the hunting ground, desperate and defiant, and she becomes that scarecrow. Skewing her arms up in the air, Diana demands that her sons stop hunting. And Stewart makes that the most moving moment I’ve seen in any film this year. Diana isn’t speaking as a royal. She’s speaking as a mother — as the woman she will now be. How will she do it? As the pop song that plays thrillingly during the following sequence tells us, all she needs is a miracle (and maybe a little fast food). She will still be “Diana.” But now she will be herself.
Deadline There is an especially telling and actually chilling scene in Spencer, Pablo Larrain’s brilliantly imagined portrait of Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) facing the crossroads of a long dead marriage during a Christmas holiday at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), stands in an ornate room at one end of a pool table while his wife Diana, clearly miserable and almost dead in the eyes, stands far apart at the other end. They are not playing pool.
A reckoning has come in their marriage and her future in the Royal Family. Charles tries to reason with her and simply explains, “every one of us has two sides. There is the real person and the one for the pictures.” The private needs vs the public person on display is something that clearly we know Diana never comfortably came to terms with, and now it has all come to a head in this eerie icily cold Christmas gathering where the family, including the Queen and her dogs, appears only to eat a lot of formal meals together and go out on hunts with their guns. It is a frigid environment, and that isn’t just a reference to the weather.
We have seen many takes on Diana from revealing and controversial TV interviews to the current Emmy nominated performance by Emma Corrin in The Crown, even stretching now to a Broadway musical. But Larrain has something very different, very intimate, and very revealing in mind here by taking us deeply into the head of Diana as she is clearly at the end of her rope having made the decision to divorce Charles, failing to even hide her misery and disdain for all the Royal circumstance trapping her in a life of which she has lost control, but is desperately trying to regain.
Larrain tackled Jackie Kennedy also through his own unique lens in Jackie which earned Natalie Portman an Oscar nomination, but Spencer is something else indeed, almost playing out in a conventional dramatic fashion, a more accessible approach in some ways, but also more ambitious as it is squarely from the point of view of its title character, purposely called Spencer to assure us that the person who once was, is well on the way to finding that very lost spirit again before it is too late.
Of course we know how it all ended, the ultimate toll it took, but that is defiantly not how Larrain’s and screenwriter Steven Knight’s story ends. And in fact it all begins with some simple words on the screen: “This is a fable based on a true tragedy.” A fable indeed, but one based on serious study by the Oscar winning director who seems fascinated by two of the most scrutinized and public women of the 20th century, Jackie and Diana, putting his own particular lens on them, but in very different ways. Larrain and Knight, employing what we know of Diana via wide ranging research, have by necessity had to create the drama behind the most closed of doors and imagine just how this pivotal holiday might have played out. There is no question the film firmly lands on the side of Diana who, showing independence right from the start, drives in through the countryside on her own, becoming fascinated with a scarecrow spotted along the way, and then thrust into the family affair, a humorless, stiff, and dreary picture of Royal life that seems about as lifeless as possible.
This isn’t The Crown, it is far more insular, an intimate portrait of a woman trying to save herself, and we see it all played out in different vignettes as she must pore over the proper outfits chosen for specific occasions, or is forced to try on pearls, a gift from Charles that she dismisses by saying he also gave “her” the same thing. In one of a few surreal fantasy scenes she consumes and spits out the pearls at a formal dinner as they land in her pea soup. She is also haunted by the ghosts of Royals-past in this house, notably Anne Boleyn, a wife of Henry VIII who had her head chopped off, clearly a figure Diana can, figuratively at least, identify with. We watch her break into dance down halls, and explode at the sight of seeing young William and Harry put through the paces of the hunt. She is on the edge throughout, and so are we watching it all unfold. The only glimmers of warmth and bonding are in the scenes with her two boys. The trio are simpatico, almost speaking their own private language, and you can see the true love of a mother depicted here, just as we always could in the real life situations we witnessed when she was alive.
The ending of the Diana story in actuality was indeed tragic. This film stops well before that and we can leave with understanding and empathy, no matter how imagined it all is. I can’t say enough about Stewart’s performance, steering from an impression of an impossibly well-chronicled figure to beautifully achieving the essence of who she was. It is a bracing, bitter, moving, and altogether stunning turn, taking Diana down roads we have not seen played out quite like in this mesmerizing portrayal. Timothy Spall as Major Alistair Gregory is a man who must keep the royal house in order, even in trying to tame Diana’s desire to escape those trappings. Her true friend here is Maggie who not only tends to her needs as any good Royal staff member would do, but also gives her moral and emotional support. Sally Hawkins is very fine and hits just the right notes in the role. Farthing manages to nail the tightly controlled Charles, but does show flashes of a human being eventually, though for the most part exhibits nothing more than the royal indoctrination the future King of England has endured his whole life. Stella Gonet’s Queen Elizabeth is properly stoical, and surrounded by her pups, in her few scenes, never better than in one moment where she reveals to Diana that the only really important photo is the one you have on British currency. Sean Harris as Darren, and Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry add some spirit as William and Harry.
The Neon Topic Studios film, which is debuting today at the Venice Film Festival and then heading to Telluride and Toronto, will be released stateside on November 5. There has been an endless examination and fascination towards Diana. Lorrain and Stewart however have excavated her soul, and, in the end, presented what we should most want to remember.
Discussing Film Princess Diana’s presence in global culture is something that cannot be ignored even to this very day. Growing up, many of us have constantly heard stories of her and the tragedy that took her life even though we weren’t alive to see it for ourselves. As an icon of such a large scale, many were skeptical when Spencer was first announced, as there is nothing worse than a biopic that fails to do justice by its main subject. Over the years, there have been many pieces of media about Diana, but none capture her essence quite like Pablo Larraín’s latest masterful work.
Shot in a mix of 16 and 35 mm film, Spencer is a feast for the eyes and at times it is beyond easy to feel as if the film holds elements of a documentary, creating a far more intimate experience. Larraín along with screenwriter Steven Knight perfectly isolate Diana as a character and apply her to a situation; in this case being the traditional three day holiday of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. Anyone who celebrates these holidays knows that with the complexities of familial affairs, an average Christmas is difficult enough, let alone a Royal Christmas. Therefore, picking this specific time period for the story is rather genius as it serves as a catalyst for the events which transpire.
Despite the degree of fame which Princess Diana gained, she maintained her sense of humanity where other royals did not. Larraín places the audience in the most private moments of the symbolic figure, allowing us to imagine what she would have been going through – even in the most trivial of times – in a genuine way, as the majority of how people view her today is through photography, interviews, and more traditional documentaries.
While Spencer will be classed as a work of fiction, it forms such harrowing parallels to the true events of Diana’s own life. On multiple occasions, distinct elements of horror and the supernatural are used to align the fate of Diana’s with that of Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry V’s wives, who he executed once he wanted a different wife by claiming that she was committing adultery when in reality, it was the other way around. In this poetic metaphor among several others, it is loud and clear where this film stands in terms of Diana’s tragic tale.
For what Spencer aims for, it gets practically as close to perfection as possible. The script is absolutely on point with such poignant and striking lines woven seamlessly into naturalistic dialogue. There are a few specific lines that pack a punch as Diana foreshadows what we know will be her demise. The film’s pace expertly matches the evolution of the story, allowing the sometimes harrowing events of Diana’s daily life to sink in. With other characters as profound as Prince Charles and also the Queen, it would not be unusual if the narrative was to lose focus, and yet Larraín manages to consistently keep Diana at the forefront. In seeing past, present, and future versions of Diana, the film is a sincere character study
Director of Photography Claire Mathon, who worked on the same level of craftsmanship on A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, has designed a profoundly chic cinematic palette. With Larraín’s influence, it is no surprise that the visual style does draw similarities to his previous acclaimed feature, Jackie. And just like that film, the way in which the various costume, hair, and makeup designs fuse together here is quite literally breathtaking.
The core of Spencer is Kristen Stewart’s powerhouse performance. When it comes to portraying a human being who is so well known, there is a pressure in visualizing them, a pressure in which Stewart does not crack under. Between her execution of Diana’s mannerisms, accent, and overall personality, this is without a doubt her most dazzling and intricate performance to date. Going into a biopic like this, there was a strong worry about performers strictly imitating their respective roles based on archival footage and such. With much relief, Kristen takes creative liberties as a true artist to avoid her version of Diana becoming a caricature, with the final result being a fully-fleshed, brand new outlook on the People’s Princess.
Alongside Stewart is a flawless ensemble, embodying the auras of these individuals who are essential to the film’s overarching plot. Jack Farthing encapsulates Prince Charles’s stern demeanor with ease, creating a quintessential foil to Stewart’s often exuberant Diana. The young actors who play William and Harry are able to evoke such tender emotions, creating some charming scenes which display how playful Diana could be as a mother and how she wanted, more than all else, to give her children and herself a sense of normality.
This is a story for everyone who holds even the faintest memory of Princess Diana close to them. Spencer is a spectacular, rare kind of biopic that portrays its main subject as more fully-fledged than ever before. The film ends on a hopeful and positive tone, making it all the more emotional when thinking of how the real ending played out. A stunning cinematic experience that fully engrosses you within the most extreme sentiment of what it means to be secluded, this brilliant retelling is an absolute must-see. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Little White Lies With films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín has made a name for himself as a purveyor of bleak surveys of life under dictatorship conditions that foreground terror, oppression and sudden violence.
With Spencer, his strange psychological fable about the late Diana Spencer over an especially tense Christmas season at the royal Sandringham estate, he presents the British monarchy as a daffy totalitarian enclave, steeped in traditions which only serve to extend their old world shelf life and filter them out from the plebs. It is an understatement to say that many living royals – including the current regent – do not come off well in this film.
The little white mouse in the maze of inhumane heritage thinking is Kristen Stewart’s perfectly-accented and effortlessly glamorous Diana, and the film charts her various strained attempts to break free of these stifling conditions. There are wicked whispers that she has “cracked”, and even the curtains have been sewn shut to stop the paparazzi from spying on her. The placement of a biography of Anne Boleyn by her bedside leads to spectral visions of the beheaded damsel, and the film asks us to question whether Diana’s frayed mindset is justified under the circumstances.
The script by Steven Knight is problematic from the get-go, packed with lots of winking pop psychology and on-the-nose portent, and clearly written with future tragedy in mind. Its main infraction, though, is that it is often witless and banal, leaving Larraín and the actors to heroically milk the drama from a string of interactions that are either overstuffed with “meaning”, or just deathly dull.
The notion that Diana harboured a not-so-secret desire for middle class normalcy and was driven to madness by so much pomp, pageantry and silent abuse is not exactly a new revelation. And yet the film operates as if it has stumbled onto box-fresh insights, which in turn leaves you waiting to discover what the real take is. And it never comes.
Unlike the maelstrom of emotions in Larain’s previous, and similarly-calibrated celebrity portrait pic, Jackie, this one is slower, linear and more austere, better to fit the genteel and regimented-to-death context of a Yuletide with Her Majesty. On paper Stewart seemed like an eccentric casting choice, yet she slinks into the material with grace and ease, and her trademark arsenal of half-met glares and anxiety-dashed grimaces perfectly express her desperate yearning to be free of prettified toff prison. Her interactions with Sally Hawkins’ bowl-cutted personal dresser, Maggie, are an obvious highlight.
The film recalls both Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, in its elegantly decked-out dissection of cloistered entitlement, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in its depiction of a person being driven stir crazy by her claustrophobic surroundings (as well as being bullied by her husband). The latter comparison is emphasised by Jonny Greenwood’s brilliant but sometimes heavy-handed score which deftly combines prim, dinnertime minuettes with clanging atonal dirges.
Spencer is a sad and hopeless film, and it shows the point where Diana can now see through the platitudes that have helped her survive so far. It’s also hard to truly understand the nature of Diana’s tragic meltdown without first knowing that she was once happy – something that the film purposely omits. There are some moments of euphoric release in the latter stages, a little like when Marilyn Chambers escapes the Leatherface house at the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but again, the feel like grist to tragedy porn mill, written only with heartbreaking hindsight in mind.
The Playlist If you have even the smallest dislike of the grotesquely redundant and regressive institution that is the British monarchy, one of the greatest pleasures of the shamelessly pleasurable, archly self-aware, high camp masterpiece that is Pablo Larraín‘s “Spencer,” is envisioning how it will play to the still-living people it glancingly portrays. Imagine the creasing of Royal brows sending Royal spectacles cascading down Royal noses! Picture the Royal flushes creeping up Royal necks! Just think of the aghast unstiffening of Their various Highnesses’ upper lips and Her Majesty’s corgis whimpering and putting their stumpy little paws over their eyes. Entirely to its credit, “Spencer” is nothing like real history, and its Diana can certainly not be proven to be anything like the real Diana, whoever that poor woman was. But that won’t stop the Di-hards and the defensive monarchists out there being royally pissed off by this immensely cinematic, gloriously melodramatic portrait of the disintegration and despair of celebrity, and by an approach that dares to have the People’s Princess utter, in a beautifully clipped and heightened imitation of Diana Spencer’s breathy, patrician voice, lines like “Leave me now. I want to masturbate.”
Like with “Jackie” and Natalie Portman – only here even more so – Larraín’s greatest coup, in a film so full of little coups it amounts to an armed insurgency against the staid traditions of the biopic, is his lead actress. Kristen Stewart, to whose casting a very vocal and very boring minority of self-appointed keepers of the Diana flame loudly objected, gives a performance that is simultaneously completely invested in the mythos of Diana and vitally distant from it. And as possibly the only actor at work right now whose own image is also such a paradoxical mixture of radiance and reticence – there is no one who so strongly projects shyness as Stewart – to have her play the most famous person ever to have so famously hated fame, is already genius-level gamesmanship. Add to that the shooting style by which Claire Mathon‘s gorgeous close-up camerawork often pushes in even closer, with sympathy so solicitous it becomes intrusive, and you have in almost any of the single shots of Stewart-as-Diana a whole encyclopedia of information about the way image is constructed, the way the world’s most looked-at women are observed as though owned by the people doing the looking. No wonder those luminous, lush full-facial shots are always lit to show the glisten of her unshed tears, as though her eyes were full of chandeliers or paparazzi flashbulbs.
Set over an astonishingly miserable three-day Christmas Diana spent at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate when Charles’ affair with Camilla was known to her but before she’d summoned the resolve to separate from him and the resources to escape the clutches of the royal machine, “Spencer” opens on one of Larraín’s favorite views: a misty half-lit lawn at dawn. Trundling along the laneway is a military convoy delivering what look to be crateloads of surface-to-air missiles but actually, turn out to be boxes full of organic vegetables and the ingredients for pastries and puddings. These have been brought in from Highgrove, which is traditionally the family residence of the Prince of Wales, but a place that Diana pointedly never means when she uses the loaded word “home.” Already now, the focus of Larraín’s film is clear: Just as he is less interested in publishing the legend than exposing the means of its construction and deconstruction, he is almost perversely uninterested in the actual pageantry of palace life. Rather, he’s fascinated by the preparation of it and the absurd circumstances of secrecy and security under which the royal retinue has to operate at all times. In the kitchens, run like a military operation by head chef Darren (a superb Sean Harris), one of Diana’s few allies, a sign hangs overhead that reads, laid out in the “Keep Calm and Carry On” school of nostalgist British graphic design: “Keep Noise To A Minimum. They Can Hear You.”
Diana is late and lost. She slipped her security detail and decided to drive there by herself in the sporty open-top Porsche that is its own oblique commentary; her in-laws arrive in Land Rovers and Rolls Royces. En route, she finds herself not far from her own childhood home, which is only a short way from Sandringham but has been boarded up and condemned as derelict for years. On a scarecrow in a field, she spots a jacket that she is convinced belonged to her father, and, heels sinking into the mud, she treks across the field and takes it. Later, she will talk to it in one of her confessional, non-sequitur-ridden monologues (Steven Knight’s script contrives a variety of such ways, including nighttime visitations by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, to get this lonely, isolated woman to speak aloud some of the thoughts we see flitting across her perfect, pinkly lipglossed, unhappy face). And it’s strangely appropriate that this moldering old jacket should be one her first confessors: In “Spencer,” not a lot actually happens, but clothes (evocatively designed by Jaqueline Durran) – the choosing of them, the dressing in them, the accessorizing of them, what they represent – are treated like plot twists.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that the only other friend Diana seems to have in this forbidding cavernous place is her dresser Maggie (a lovely, warm Sally Hawkins). Again, as in “Jackie,” where Greta Gerwig played a somewhat analogous role, Larraín is acutely aware of the freeing potential of female friendships for women in otherwise fraught and trapped circumstances, even if the relationship is between employer and employee, or here, princess and commoner. But outside of Maggie and Diana’s children William and Harry (William, especially, comes out of “Spencer” rather well; a sweet kid highly sensitive to his loving mother’s fragile state), Diana seems utterly alone. Especially when being spied on by a phalanx of servants headed by Timothy Spall‘s equerry, whose disdain for Diana’s flouting of the rules and traditions of royalty could be measured, like the distance between the tip of his nose and his upper lip, in acres. Under his black watch, Diana is forever glimpsed entering rooms after everyone else has left, or creeping into the larder to gorge late at night, or leaning blearily on the toilet bowl into which she has just made herself vomit, her fairytale-sparkly tulle gown fanned out heartbreakingly around her on the bathroom floor.
These three days mark a small move toward liberation for Diana, but it is all internal. She has only one interaction with the Queen – which is remarkable for its directness and surprising lack of animosity – and only a couple more with her estranged husband (Jack Farthing). During one of these, he remonstrates with her that he is the less reported-on of the pair because “I keep my curtains drawn” – an ironic comment for someone who will soon be recorded longing to be another woman’s tampon in a phone call. But it’s also true that Charles never was the subject of the kind of scrutiny that would cost his wife so dearly, and also true that even once he’s gone, Charles will never get a biopic like “Spencer,” if biopic it is at all.
Under the utterly gorgeous melodies of Jonny Greenwood‘s absolutely-should-be-Oscar-winning score (between this and Jane Campion‘s “The Power of the Dog,” Greenwood is already inarguably the musical MVP of Venice), Diana cries and fights and fails and breaks, she beats her hands against the walls of her confinement, and tears open the sewn-shut curtains of her chamber like a 1950s melodrama heroine observed through the dazzlingly shattered prism of modern celebrity obsession. “Will they kill me?” she asks jokingly at one point, and then later, less jokily and with more doom in her velvety voice, “It’s set. It’s as if everything has already happened.” This is the shamelessness of Larraín’s approach – he feels no compunction about reversing the tragedy of Diana’s premature death into her living present, and still has managed to make a defiantly un-commercial, weird, witty, peculiarly personal statement about perhaps the most bankably well-known tragic woman of the 20th century. All the right people are going to hate “Spencer.” That’s just how good it is. [A]
The Guardian andringham, Christmas 1991. Bare trees, frosted fields, dead pheasants on the drive. Inside the grand house the dining table has been laid in readiness, but one of the principal guests – arguably the main course – is running late and lost. She grinds her car to a halt, tosses her perfect hair in frustration. “Where the fuck am I?” asks Diana, Princess of Wales.
And so begins this extraordinary film, which bills itself as “a fable from a true tragedy” and spotlights three days in the dissolution of Charles and Di’s marriage. Working off a sharp script by Steven Knight, Chilean director Pablo Larraín spins the headlines and scandals into a full-blown Gothic nightmare, an opulent ice palace of a movie with shades of Rebecca at the edges and a pleasing bat-squeak of absurdity in its portrayal of the royals. Larraín’s approach to the material is rich and intoxicating and altogether magnificent. I won’t call it majestic. That would do this implicitly republican film a disservice.
Jetted in from California, Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides. When she broke down, lost her poise, it was like watching a Stepford wife throw a glitch. But Stewart effectively captures the agony of a woman so programmed and insulated that she feels she has no escape and has lost sight of who she is. The servants (well played by Sally Hawkins and Sean Harris) want to help but they are part of the very machine that she hates. They know that if Diana breaks down, the mechanism does too. What matters above all else is to keep the woman up and running.
Should you ever be invited, please don’t go to Sandringham. Larraín makes the place look as spooky as Kubrick’s hotel in The Shining, with endless corridors and haunted chambers and sulphurous guests sat ramrod-straight at the table. It’s a place, says Diana, where everybody hears everything, even your innermost thoughts. And around every corner lurks the serene, spectral presence of all-seeing Major Gregory (Timothy Spall). The royals themselves are largely kept out of sight, like a bunch of sacred cows. Major Gregory, one realises, is the real ruler of this house.
Small wonder the princess keeps making a dash for the door. The film depicts Charles (played by Jack Farthing) as peevish and unsympathetic. The Queen ruefully explains to Diana that she’s currency, nothing more. But now she’s roiling and raging, seeing Anne Boleyn’s ghost in her bedroom and clinging to William and Harry as though they’re a pair of life preservers. Installed at yet another of those ghastly formal dinners, she slips into a fugue state and imagines ripping the choker from her throat, dumping the pearls in the soup and swallowing the beads one-by-one.
No doubt it took an outsider to make a film that’s as unreverential as Spencer, which dares to examine the royals as if they were specimens under glass. At heart, of course, Larraín and Knight’s tale is utterly preposterous. It’s a tragedy about a spoiled princess who lashes out at the servants; a thriller about a woman who has only 10 minutes to get into her dress before Christmas dinner is served. But how else do you play it? The monarchy itself is preposterous. Spencer presents the whole institution as little more than a silly ongoing game of dress-up, a farce that depends for its survival on everyone playing along and propping up the illusion, the old moth-eaten brocade. Anybody who doesn’t is ostracised, crushed or cast out in the cold, with the scarecrow and the pheasants and the shivering security men. “Will they kill me, do you think?” says Diana, half-joking, and such is the level of fury and tension that just for a moment we believe that they might.
Spencer screens at the Venice film festival, and is released on 5 November in the US and UK.
Awardswatch A spiky icon and a gentle iconoclast, Diana Spencer occupies a place in the public consciousness of Britain and the rest of the world which is as complicated as it is enormous. Pablo Larraín’s sublime new film about her, in which she is played by a career-best Kristen Stewart, is a fitting and fantastic tribute.
It’s a bit like one of the dozen-plus amazing outfits Stewart wears in the film. To say Stewart’s Diana is dressed to the nines throughout Spencer would be putting it far too royally. In terms the Diana we see in Spencer would use, she looks fucking fantastic.
Spencer is a raunchier, more rebellious Diana than we’ve seen her portrayed onscreen before. Practically her first word in the film is a sassy expletive, and we go from there. Stewart’s take on the late princess is much less innocent and childish than Emma Corrin’s stellar performance on Netflix’s royal series The Crown, though that’s partly because Spencer is set a decade later than most of the show’s most recent season. By 1990, Diana really had been through it. Charles and Camilla’s affair was public and flagrantly practiced (Diana wasn’t a prude, either). William and Harry are old enough for Diana to see how Charles fares as a father. Like in every other aspect, he’s unimpressive.
Yet Diana is also particularly thorny here because Pablo Larraín is behind the wheel. His similarly-styled 2016 drama Jackie told the story of John F. Kennedy’s long-suffering wife, with Natalie Portman also doing career-best work. The attachment of British screenwriter Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Serenity, Locked Down) admittedly sparked some concern. I feared Knight’s normie style would make Spencer more conventional than Jackie, less fiery, less transgressive.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Knight is a canny writer able to present his subject’s quiet solitude and her noisy, troublemaking side with subtlety and grace. That’s best seen in Diana’s nervous self-identification with Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife and the first of two he had beheaded. Diana’s fear of expendability is artfully communicated in that particular anxiety.
It’s also reasonably well-founded. Early in our education, British children are taught Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword, a sign of the tyrant king’s grace and continued love for her. It’s only on reflection that the sheer savagery of such an act, such a family and such a system really becomes clear. Well, that was Diana’s experience with the Windsors, too. Boleyn is much more than just a rumoured distant relative.
And on the subject of distant relatives, the sitting royals aren’t much fun, either. Jack Farthing’s Charles is an infuriating bore. He scowls and tuts and rolls his eyes, saying little. Farthing is a very good fit in a film which, interestingly, gives the so-called Firm of the family few lines and certainly no big names. This is wise: Spencer knows who its main character is. When Diana starts acting out over dinner — quite understandably — Charles just looks to his mum for help and glares down glumly at his food. It’s a reaction so wildly frustrating and neglectful I wanted to punch him in the face and abolish the monarchy on the spot.
Diana almost certainly would never have supported the second of those responses, though maybe the first. A posh girl who grew up yards away from the Queen’s east of England Sandringham estate-cum-correctional facility where most of Spencer takes place, she became the unlikeliest of anti-establishment divas. Watching her go on that journey is joyful and enthralling, even if she’s gone most of the way before the events of Spencer. Diana caught the public imagination because of her atypical generosity and arresting fashion sense and risky exploits. But more importantly, I think, because her fights against domestic oppression exist for most of us. Not all our mothers-in-law are the Queen of England. That it sometimes feels like they are placed Diana in the very centre of millions of our lives. She hasn’t left
That’s not to say Spencer revolves entirely around Diana. Seasoned English character actors Timothy Spall and Sean Harris play palace staff who keep a watchful eye, presumably on orders from above. Sally Hawkins is the highlight of the bunch as Maggie, Diana’s most trusted dresser and confidante.
Still, no one is allowed to outshine Stewart here. She doesn’t let them. The ex-Twilight star who, in Personal Shopper five years ago, showed us she is one of America’s most capable actresses, Stewart simply soars. Amid brief British worries about her accent, Stewart delivers an impeccable brogue. Her performance is even better. As a terrified young woman and scorned wife and semi-manic mom grounded by William and Harry — but only just — Stewart and Knight and Larraín have a laser-focused idea of a tragic figure and an accidental revolutionary.
The Chilean director’s film can only, then, be consistently brilliant and tremendously moving. Or, in terms Stewart’s Diana might use, fucking fantastic. Grade: A
New York Times While watching the new film “Spencer,” which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, I kept pondering Kristen Stewart’s long, unlikely association with the fashion house Chanel.
The actress has been an ambassador for Chanel since 2013, when she was fresh off the “Twilight” series. At first blush, it might have seemed like a bad pairing: In her off-hours, the insouciant Stewart is more of a jeans-and-Converse type, while Chanel is high-end clothing that can verge, without the proper styling, on prim and fusty.
But something fascinating happens when Stewart dons those tweed jackets. Because they aren’t a natural fit for her, she wears them more provocatively: Sometimes they’re slung over her shoulders with the casual cool of a leather jacket, or they’re fastened only at the top with nothing on underneath. Instead of becoming the classic ideal of a Chanel woman, Stewart wrests that ideal toward her, and the distance that remains between those two extremes is the thing that catches and keeps your eye.
Something rather similar happens in “Spencer,” in which Stewart plays Princess Diana. Already, your mind may be reeling at that potentially calamitous collision of famous figures: A slouchy American star as the people’s princess of Wales? How can an iconoclast like Stewart play the icon that was Diana?
The tip-off comes early, during the film’s opening sequence. It’s Christmas Eve at Sandringham House, where the royal family has gone to spend the holidays. Their breakfasts, lunches and dinners will be executed with all the precision of a military maneuver because … well, it literally is a military maneuver, with soldiers pressed into service to transport fresh produce and lobsters to Sandringham in camo-clad trucks.
Meanwhile, as the kitchen staff is standing at firm attention, Princess Diana is lost. We meet her in a BMW convertible as she stares at her map, miles off course in the countryside with no security detail to keep her on track. Her first line includes a muttered expletive and her next, offered to a star-struck roadside clerk, is both plain and plaintive: “Where am I?” Once she gets to Sandringham, she’ll be even more lost.
So if you’re wondering how a star like Stewart fits into a British drawing-room drama, the answer is that she’s not really supposed to: Diana doesn’t, after all. The princess goes to great lengths to avoid the rest of the royal family, but Stewart as Diana thrives in those encounters, when the contrast between her and the stiff-lipped British cast becomes so palpable that she’s reduced to a trembling mess.
Does Stewart nail the voice, the accent, the posture, the star quality? Well, it’s not really one-to-one accuracy that compels us while watching “Spencer”: As with those Chanel jackets, Stewart is pulled toward Diana and Diana is pulled toward her. The actress is working in a different, higher voice register here, and she has incorporated some of Diana’s physical tics into her own repertoire, including the way the princess would tuck her chin into her shoulder, her upturned eyes either fearful or coy depending on who’s looking.
This Diana is not quite as girlish as the one Emma Corrin played on the recent fourth season of “The Crown”; in fact, “Spencer” is set in 1991 (a year after the period covered in that season), when Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles has pretty much disintegrated. At this point in her life, Diana is an uneasy contradiction, both hardened and more vulnerable than ever. The princess has a tendency to rant about her situation to people she’s just met, all the while clutching at the string of jumbo pearls that ring her neck like a padlocked collar.
This is fertile, febrile territory for the director Pablo Larraín, who explored the customs of American royalty in “Jackie” (2016), starring Natalie Portman. As the former first lady Jackie Kennedy, Portman eschewed her usual naturalism to work with bolder colors, turning in the sort of astonishing, go-for-broke performance that could also be reproduced note-for-note as a Snatch Game character on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Stewart’s performance isn’t nearly as campy, though the movie around her often tilts in that direction. Larraín has an artful eye but a mind for melodrama, and the script by Steven Knight so relentlessly underlines its metaphors that it can sometimes flirt with parody. It’s not enough for Diana to flip through a book about Anne Boleyn, another royal wife done wrong; by the end of the film, Diana is hallucinating absurd visions of Boleyn that prompted a few titters at Friday’s “Spencer” press screening.
But Stewart always proves to be a grounding presence, no matter how lost Diana gets. The more the movie goes on, the more her casting even seems like a meta stroke of genius: Stewart is one of the few people on the planet who has known paparazzi scrutiny that is even somewhat comparable to the fusillade of flashbulbs that hounded Diana until her death. If Diana doesn’t always want to come out of her room, you can imagine that Stewart has felt those feelings, too: Whether she plays the game or not, there’s no real way to win.
I’ll let accent experts decide whether Stewart’s British tongue is in the right place; to me, her intentions always were. In “Spencer,” much is made of Diana’s dresses, which she is supposed to wear in a certain order to certain events; of course, she immediately disregards those rules, letting what she wears be guided by gut feeling. Is it proper? Is it accurate? Well, who cares when it’s all so interesting?
Film of the Week When it was announced that Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart were to make a new film about Princess Diana, people reasonably wondered if the subject wasn’t a bit spent. Wasn’t The Crown about to get into all that? But Spencer, the eerie, witty and quite extraordinary film that has resulted from their persistence, isn’t necessarily for fans of The Crown, or fetishists of royal ritual and ceremony. Indeed, it often goes perversely out of its way to avoid showing us such pomp, even as it spans the three-day ordeal of a Royal Family Christmas at Sandringham: it adopts the subjective, obstinate tunnel vision of Diana herself, spiralling into depression on the brink of ending her long-mouldering marriage, and keen to avoid meeting the gaze of as many of her in-laws as possible.
And so, in turn, do we. Much of Spencer is consumed with Diana’s desperate efforts to be alone, with only us for company. We ride shotgun with her as she drives haphazardly through the countryside, we hover with her in the bathroom as she delays turning up for dinner, we follow her into the walk-in fridge after midnight as she decides she’s hungry after all. When she speaks, it’s largely to those below her in the chain of command: chefs and butlers and dressers and ghosts. (She’s either losing her mind or finding it at last: not for nothing do the long, depopulated hallways of Sandringham occasionally call the Overlook Hotel to mind.) Charles and the Queen get curt, hostile cameos; more dialogue is devoted to her children, presented here as just a few steps of fate from the normality that eventually eluded them.
But mostly, it’s just Diana, whose face is ever more closely and warmly cradled by cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) as she attempts to back out of her surroundings entirely. As in Larraín’s equally brilliant, surprising Jackie, to which Spencer is an intricately attuned companion piece, the director thrills in presenting a public icon freed of her public, unsure how to act around herself: she wanders and runs and whirls through empty, undirected spaces, and deflates in a ballgowned heap by the toilet. Larraín again adopts that film’s blend of gliding formal precision and brash, delicious bad taste, though Mica Levi’s alien score from Jackie has been swapped out for equally unnerving, shuddering free-jazz compositions by Jonny Greenwood.
Spencer is at once a work of great sensitivity and high, hilarious camp, less interested in identifying the “real” Diana than in building a living, breathing character in the blank space between costume, iconography and everything we’ve always speculated and assumed about her suffering. Casting Stewart, another reserved celebrity who knows the obsessive, overbearing glare of fandom better than most, is inspired. Her performance isn’t just a dully transformative feat of mimicry, though she’s paid detailed attention to Diana’s posture and posing, especially. Rather, it’s a wry, empathetic evocation of a woman somehow locked out of both her inner and outer lives, frozen in the corridor — before making a run for the fire escape.
Time Out Making an arthouse film based on an icon as deeply and emotionally enshrined in the public imagination as Princess Diana takes ingenuity. Fortunately, Chilean director, Pablo Larraín, has that quality in spades. He uses the known facts about the feathered-haired, breathy-voiced People’s Princess – and a few imagined ones – to spin a singular, baroque and psychologically-nuanced vision of life inside a gilded cage, enabled by a virtuoso performance by Kristen Stewart.
‘It’s just three days,’ she murmurs as she drives up to spend Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in Sandringham with the in-laws. It is quickly inferred that Charles’s affair with Camilla is well underway, as is Diana’s bulimia and her hunted status as a paparazzi obsession. These psychological troubles mark her as a liability in an environment where the important thing is to never make a fuss.
Just as he did in 2016’s portrait of an equally iconic First Lady, Jackie, Larraín spares no expense to render the royal estate in an ornate splendour that verges on the gothic. A portrait of Henry VIII in the dining room serves as a reminder of who – and what – is deemed worthy of worship in this world.
Stewart is extraordinary at conjuring up a rarefied form of neurotic energy. She is a modern woman and a people-pleaser, a mother and a spurned wife, and to top it off she’s begun to hallucinate Anne Boleyn. A member of the palace staff (a gaunt Timothy Spall) is deputised to coldly monitor her every move, interfering to exert control with oppressive regularity. Curtains are sewn shut, dresses labelled per event, nighttime walks are reported. Welcome warmth comes thanks to Sally Hawkins as a dresser and confidante, and from young William and Harry (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) – both wonderful at showing both the discipline of little princes and the sweetness of young boys who are worried about their mummy.
There is a delightful archness to the characterisation of the other royals, each rendered in telling vignettes and given lines of burnished gold to utter. As the film’s opening titlecard announces: ‘This is a fable based on a true tragedy.’ Larraín is not driven by conventional biopic motives, but by the desire to evoke the bizarre elements of Diana’s story. Showing how the dream of being a rich and beautiful princess curdled into a nightmare might sound like a hard sell, but Spencer pulls it off in heightened, claustrophobic and truly decadent fashion.
Steven Knight’s script drops in the factors that have led to Diana’s fragile mental state with a clarity that punches through the intoxicating elegance of set and costume design. Yet it is Stewart who pulls off a dervish dance that moves from mania to stillness, from studied composure to emotional abandon, all while keeping control of that voice.
Her Diana is a mass of complications and although for the lion’s share of the runtime she seems victimised by circumstance, a crucial scene on the road with her kids is full of the freedom that longs to burst forth. In this moment, Larraín reclaims the vitality of the woman from the tragedy associated with her name, and it’s a beautiful emotional release.
THN Following up his acclaimed biopic Jackie, Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is a refreshingly different genre piece that this time chooses to put Princess Diana under the microscope – devoid of the taboo soap opera ideals and tactless tabloid melodrama and, instead, going for surrealism and decadence in one of this year’s best films.
Following up his acclaimed biopic Jackie, Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is a refreshingly different genre piece that this time chooses to put Princess Diana under the microscope – devoid of the taboo soap opera ideals and tactless tabloid melodrama and, instead, going for surrealism and decadence in one of this year’s best films.
Taking place over three days – from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – in which Diana (Kristen Stewart)’s relationship with husband Charles (Jack Farthing) fell apart, Spencer digs into what those paparazzi photos and headlines really meant for the Royal Family. “There’s no hope for me, not with them,” remarks Diana as she’s dolled up for the world and made to conform to a household that stifles who she is. As the pressure of the monarchy mounts though, Diana’s unravelling soon leads her to a boiling point.
Where most films or shows about the Royal Family obey traditionalism, Spencer is an audacious endeavour that throws all of the rules out of the window. This is a movie in which Diana self-harms and cusses and the only thing anyone cares about is their reputation: “the only portrait that matters is the one they put on the 10-pound note”, mutters our very own Queen. Larrain doesn’t care about the headlines and the controversy and digs into who these people really were. It’s a take that not everyone will like. But if you’ve seen Jackie, this is a similar exercise in genre-defying, rule-bending biopic storytelling from the Chilean filmmaker.
Dabbed with surrealist flourishes and accompanied by a sumptuous score from Jonny Greenwood, Spencer offers a more elegiac portrait of Diana. She’s damaged and tragic, worn down by the pressure cooker that is the monarchy, and Larrain really puts her under the microscope for dissection. In doing so, Larrain’s intimate touch makes this one of the more enthralling and vulnerable character studies premiering at the Lido this September. And Stewart is astounding in the role. Of course, she has the mannerisms and the accent all down to a tee. She looks the part, this much was made clear by the promotional images. But it’s the paranoia that she nails. This is a ravaged character and you can feel Stewart’s desperation and pain seeping through the screen. It’s hard to imagine that any performance will come close to this one come awards season later down the line.
Much like Jackie before it, Larrain’s Spencer is a visually arresting and deeply intimate biopic that is elevated by its fantastical nature with a luscious soundtrack to boot. The production and costume design are absorbing and the whole thing is anchored by a sublime turn from Stewart. Turning the royal family, and one of its most iconic personalities a Gothic nightmare makes for one of the best films of the year. Who knew?
One Room With A View Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana biopic, Spencer, gets about as far away from a cradle-to-grave template as possible, instead charting the three days of Christmas, 1991, as the pressure to conform to royal life finally overwhelms her. It’s introduced as “a fable from a true tragedy”, and you can add to that an oppressive air of psychological horror, evoking The Shining, of all films.
Steven Knight’s script is hyper-focused on Diana’s mental state from moment-to-moment. As befitting a Royal Family whose code is silence, decorum and tradition, barely a word is out of place. Diana is not reprimanded for turning up late, or dressing with the curtains open, she is simply reminded of ‘the way things are done’ by a household staff containing excellent supporting performances from Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins and Sean Harris.
Kristen Stewart is a fantastic choice for this Diana, superb at conveying emotion through small expressions. She radiates charisma befitting the woman herself, with a little help from the luminous lens of Claire Mathon. She clearly relishes Diana’s rebellious nature, fighting back against the establishment that tries to suffocate her with an air of gleeful camp.
Larraín’s direction is gripping, roaming through the endless claustrophobic palace corridors and blocking the supporting cast to emphasise how trapped Diana is. Johnny Greenwood’s dizzying score is another highlight, delivering jazzy asides and operatic swells to capture the shifting mood.
This Diana is caught in the confines of royal life, where the present is ruled by the past, or perhaps just haunted by its ghosts. But she doesn’t want to escape into a freer future. Ominously, perhaps she fears no future will be possible for her. Instead she fights to return home, to before she was Diana, to when she wasn’t a figure of adoration or jealousy, to when she was just a Spencer. RATING: 5/5
The Film Stage The contemporary royal family are more compelling as media figures than anything with much consequence to how life is lived in Britain today. They make great fodder for prestige Netflix dramas (The Crown) and above-average awards bait (Stephen Frears’ The Queen), expert punchlines for jokes in more irreverent sectors of the domestic press, and clearly keep the nation’s souvenir postcard and commemorative-tea-set industries in the black. The recent involvement of Prince Andrew as a background player in the horrifying Epstein scandal seemed to crystallize where much national public opinion stands on the Royals.
But it wasn’t always so. In the ‘80s, and especially the ‘90s, we had Diana, Princess of Wales—cherished for her philanthropy and down-to-earth charm—who completely altered perceptions of her brood, and rudely jostled them into the 21st century: an era where their position as national standard-bearers and role models further evolved. Just look at the media hubbub around Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for how Diana influenced the way royals are expected to behave and be perceived today. Maybe she was the first “woke” heir apparent to the British Monarch.
This is arguably why Kristen Stewart is both such a counterintuitive and oddly apt choice for the role in Spencer, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s second noteworthy look at a female icon in the halls of power. Stewart is so Californian in tone, manner, and sensibility but also shares with her assignment the dubious honor of immeasurable media attention and sublime public-fashion sense. The make-up and hairstyling here bears such accuracy that she disappears into a character like she seldom has in her enviable 2010s filmography, but there is poetic justice in embodying a woman who was so underestimated by some, then triumphed in front of their faces.
Larraín’s once-again eclectic directorial choices and Steven Knight’s (Peaky Blinders, Eastern Promises) reductive screenplay are liabilities, but Spencer (named after Diana’s maiden name) gains urgency from being such a necessary story. It also earns relatability for being centered on something many of us might or have gone through: the decision to end a serious, long-term relationship. It’s Christmas 1992—that fraught, frosty time of year—and Diana is quaking at the prospect of three dull and excruciating days with her unloved husband, Charles, the Prince of Wales (a great Jack Farthing), and two stony in-laws (the Queen and Prince Philip—just imagine!). Her beloved Princes Philip and Harry are of course present, hauntingly unaware of their mother’s inner strife. And the vulpine paparazzi who so recklessly brought Diana’s tragic end are circling; to them, a tense Royal Christmas at the Queen’s Sandringham estate is itself the most coveted gift.
A fey, but not impertinent opening title—”a fable from a true tragedy”—substitutes for the mandatory note that this is a work of contrived fiction. Larraín’s most speculative and provocative elements center on Diana’s mental health issues—reported in the press around the time of her actual divorce in 1995 but little understood. They skirt accusations of poor taste and gain power in how they humanize Diana, making her yet again the figure of deserving pathos she carried in life and then death. The Tudor monarch King Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn appears to her in oneiric visions, to surprised giggles from my Venice audience, though the film never implies she was schizophrenic. She struggled with and eventually overcame Bulimia nervosa, shown in her obsessive fear of and fixation on food, and the dazed little midnight walks she takes down the underground pantry. A fairly preposterous sequence shows her spinning and dancing in a grand fixture of the palace; here we remember Larraín made the dance-saturated Ema.
The most memorable character moments take place not with her soon-to-be-excised family but with the concerned and dutiful “downstairs” staff: official roles in place since the early modern era (and portrayed memorably in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite). Cast with known actors—instead of the royal family, who engender “who is that?” squints—they draw out Diana’s feelings in confidence, and also betray that confidence by disclosing her unstable state to other staff and concerned parties. Sally Hawkins is a handmaiden who shares a touching queer love for her (perhaps a nod to Diana’s AIDS activism and her gay icon status). The brilliant (and underrated) Sean Harris is the chef: a chilling sequence opening the film shows the family’s seafood supper being transported to the property by the military in bulletproof cases.
Stewart excels over her mediocre inherited family, and the film itself: Knight’s script suffers from an over-reliance on psychological interpretations, that these irritants in such a compressed span of time were this fundamental for Diana’s independent reemergence into public life. Larraín once again swipes from more original filmmakers (the aforementioned Lanthimos, and Kubrick with the score and production design), and his swings for profundity end up stranded in camp. But this is a film that will potentially delight, challenge, and force its wide target audience to take seriously on its own terms. A dream ballet of a dying star.
Sight and Sound It was once an easy criticism to throw at the Royal Family that they were essentially a soap opera, gifted glamour on account of the settled dust of centuries, but these days it feels like they literally are a soap opera. It’s not so much a criticism as a statement of fact. If it isn’t Meghan and Harry promoting their own documentary series, then it’s The Crown, now filming its fifth season. The question then might be: is there really need for another dramatization featuring the Royals? Will Windsor fatigue set in? Or does Pablo Larraín have something new to offer in his film Spencer?
The answer to the last is yes, in parts. The Chilean director brings an outsider’s eye to a peculiar institution while Kristen Stewart gives a portrait of a woman coming to pieces that is intimate and at times touching. For Larraín, it’s easy to see the appeal of Diana. Throughout his career, he has been drawn to complex female figures, whether it’s the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy in Jackie (2016) or a reggaeton dancer in Ema (2019). The former especially is going to draw comparisons with this latest film, given that it shares structural similarities and a fascination with celebrity. The latter dimension also chimes well with the casting of Stewart, whose own relationship to her intense fame has frequently been ambivalent, to say the least.
Told over three days in 1991, the film opens with Diana (Stewart) lost on the country roads, trying to arrive at Sandringham House where the Royal Family have gathered to celebrate Christmas. It is an inauspicious start to her visit, as arriving after the Queen is not simply rude but an important breach of protocol. It won’t be the last time. She is greeted by a new face, an equerry played by Timothy Spall, an ex-soldier who has been called in partly to keep an eye on the troubled Princess.
Fortunately, there are some friendly faces as well. Her dresser (Sally Hawkins) offers sympathetic counsel, as does a chef (Sean Harris), and her sons Harry and William (Freddie Spry and Jack Nielen) are obvious sources of unconditional love as well as allies in still not being convinced of the absurdities that are handed on as tradition. But ranged against her is the coldness of husband Charles (Jack Farthing), the blank indifference of the other Royals and the possible subterfuge and spying of the staff.
Physically, Kristen Stewart more resembles Naomi Watts playing Princess Diana than Diana herself. Fortunately, the film is vastly superior to the so-bad-it’s-just-bad Diana (2013) and her performance is central to that. Her breathy English accent sometimes veers towards impersonation, but Stewart captures Diana’s fragility and her yearning to escape the strictures of the family she’s found herself in.
Screenwriter Stephen Knight has kept the focus riveted on Diana. With the exception of Charles and (briefly) the Queen, the rest of the Royal Family are either off stage or silent figures. Larraín stays with Diana’s subjective point of view. Time is cut and sudden ellipses – frequently skipping meal times – give us a sense of Diana’s own increasingly fractured perception. The film explicitly shows the Princess as suffering from mental health issues. The eating disorders are portrayed in a way that will make you look in a different way at the much-praised poster of the film. Self-harm and hallucinations also figure, the latter including repeated visions of Anne Boleyn as a bit too on-the-nose ghost. It is also unclear to what extent Diana is genuinely being targeted or whether it is paranoia on her part. Right from the off she is understandably flustered when asked to weigh herself as part of a tradition dating back to Prince Albert. But whether this is a deliberate humiliation or just a grossly insensitive insistence on tradition is never made fully clear.
Diana, however, isn’t simply a victim. She also has a mischievous glint to her, dismissing one servant by telling her she wants to masturbate. In fact she’s at her best with her sons, as when they all play a game on Christmas night – more a big sister in cahoots after lights out than a mum.
Cinematographer Claire Mathon captures the watercolors of a British winter: pallid sunlight and frosty fields and the lush interiors which, despite their beauty, manage to also look as cold as Diana and the boys repeatedly complain. Jonny Greenwood provides a string chamber music score that riffs on Schubert even as it tilts frantically, following Diana’s loosening grip on reality.
Not everything works. The upstairs-downstairs mechanics are overly familiar – food prepared with military precision, dogs being walked – as much from Downton Abbey as The Crown. The anticipation of Tony Blair’s rebranding of Diana as the People’s Princess, with the help declaring her affection for Diana, smacks of sycophancy. But at its most successful the film is a compelling picture of a troubled young woman in a hostile environment at the heart of the British state.
JumpCutOnline Kristen Stewart packs a powerhouse performance in Spencer – Pablo Larrain’s extravagant tale based on the life of Diana Princess of Wales. But if you thought Spencer was little more than a character study of the People’s Princess, think again. Instead, Larrain has made something really special here – using smaller moments over the more well-publicised ones to build a portrait of a woman living her life publicly. Albeit in little more than a gilded cage.
The opening subtitle tells us exactly what’s in store – “A Fable from a True Tragedy”. This is not a broad biopic. Instead, Spencer tells the story of a three-day period over Christmas, ten years after Diana’s marriage to the Prince of Wales.
It’s an excellent choice. Limiting the scope of this piece to such a short time period allows Kristen Stewart much more artistic license to portray the feeling and emotion rather than historically accurate facts. And this is where Spencer really shines. Kristen Stewart offers a staggering yet subtle performance as Diana, who seems to navigate her life of royal duty from one moment to the next.
Heading to Sandringham alone in a sports car, Diana briefly pulls into a roadside diner, declaring that she’s ‘completely lost’. It’s that sense of confusion and being lost in her own life that Kristen Stewart plays with gusto – and as Diana arrives for the royal Christmas, the symbolism is layered on in heaps and spades.
Timothy Spall is wonderful, as usual, as Major Gregory – a royal equerry who has been charged with making sure Diana behaves. After all, the British press are keeping a keen eye on the princess. And the royal household doesn’t want any slip ups.
What unfolds is a three-day period of intense scrutiny and isolation – even in a roomful of people, you get the sense that Diana is completely alone. That’s partly down to Stewart’s impeccable portrayal, but also due to Larrain’s deft hand in setting up her crushing, maze-like surroundings. The royal household often feels more like the Overlook Hotel, and it’s this claustrophobic mood which only heightens Diana’s isolation. Her itinerary is meticulously planned from one moment to the next, as she navigates painfully rigid family meals and a bone-crushingly strict regimen. Even her wardrobe has already been chosen for her.
You get the sense that Diana was given no chance to breathe, let alone make her own decisions. It’s soul-crushing to watch, and Stewart often brings it all painfully to life with just a glance. Spencer really is a masterclass in understated performance, and Kristen Stewart shines – albeit subtly.
Elsewhere, Diana’s husband, the Princess of Wales (played by Jack Farthing) is as uptight as ever. Charles often receives the same treatment in the eyes of the media – painted as little more than a stuffy, unyielding man, bound by honour and duty. It’s a similar case here, but Farthing’s performance acts as a foil for Kristen Stewart’s anguish. Diana is all too aware of the Prince’s affections for Camilla Parker Bowles, and this only serves to heighten the film’s tension to inescapable levels. Despite this, there are some tender moments – largely between Diana and her sons, William and Harry (played by Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry). These moments offer some much-needed respite between the coldness of the rest of her bleak existence. And the occasional warm exchange with royal house staff shows Diana that she’s not alone.
But as the weekend continues, so too does her torment. Eventually, the cracks begin to widen, with Diana’s struggle with bulimia and self-harm laid bare. A shift in tone leads to a more gothic telling of her story as Diana reads about the equally unhappy Anne Boleyn. Forcing her to confront her own unhappiness, her thoughts take on a darker meaning, and it’s clear that she has reached a point of no return.
Of course, we know how her tragic story plays out. But the genius in Spencer is reframing it as an almost mythical tale. We confront the innermost demons of a woman whose life was barely her own. And it’s an incredibly bold choice to premiere the film so close to the 24th anniversary of Diana’s death.
Spencer is an absolute masterpiece, with incredibly close character work and a staggering performance from Kristen Stewart. Pablo Larrain traverses the royal household in a wholly new and uncomfortable way, bringing a sense of psychological terror to a story we have seen played out time and time again in the media. But this is closer, more brutal and much more raw. - Rating: ★★★★
The Cinema Spot Beginning with the absence of one of Her Majesty’s most important royal guests during the winter of 1991 at the Queen’s Sandringham estate. That person is none other than the extremely chic, yet tragic icon that is Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales.
The film starts on a pleasant note as Diana gets lost on her way to Sandringham. Also, there’s a fantastic, short line that occurs here that left the Venice audience in complete shock. Innocently, like a normal person, she stops and asks for directions. Yet, Diana doesn’t put much thought into how it’s rather uncommon for Royals to trudge around alone, like an everyday civilian. This is of great importance throughout the film as Diana is plunged into a hallucinogenic-like trance as she attempts to break free of the walls that enclose around her.
The film follows Diana (Kristen Stewart) as she attends the Royal family’s annual Christmas get together. The gathering includes eating three exquisite meals a day, opening Christmas presents, family photos and the men going out and shooting poor pheasants. However, Diana has little interest in the closed-in lifestyle that her so-called family lives. She feels more boxed in than ever as she enters the walls of Sandringham.
Spencer manages to be both unnervingly melancholic and joyful, especially as Pablo Larraín deftly ends off this nightmare-induced fable. Audience members will leave the film with a smile on their face, while having to wipe off the remnants of the tears from scenes prior. This is a testament to the mastery that Larraín shows throughout this film. Spencer is unabashedly bold as it brings an entirely new Diana to life, one that is incredibly raw and hasn’t been seen before in any past cinematic depiction. But what makes the film’s bold approach most interesting is the fact that Larraín isn’t English, one can’t help but feel that he brings a new sensibility to Diana’s story.
Kristen Stewart is unparalleled as Princess Diana; she nails absolutely everything. Whether it be: her accent, her posture or anything else, Stewart delivers. Simply put, it would be an absolute shocker if Stewart doesn’t get nominated, let alone win the Oscar. Talking of Oscar-worthiness, Portrait of a Lady on Fire cinematographer Claire Mathon’s shots are a thing of beauty. Mathon’s cinematography is a major part of Spencer’s DNA as it injects Diana into a stylistic, avant-garde world. Mathon chose to shoot on 16mm film which allowed her the ability to restrain the film’s colour palette to the sumptuous pastille colours seen throughout the film. Acting as a big contrast is all the haunting scenes with Anne Boleyn, which is an extremely accurate and powerful metaphor for Diana’s struggles.
Ultimately, Spencer takes a radically stylistic approach to its filmmaking which helps depict Princess Diana’s hardships in a new, refreshingly hopeful, while still sad, light. Without a doubt, Kristen Stewart is going to be non-stop talked about as she delivers a top-notch, career-best performance. Even though it’s heart wrenching to watch, the hopeful and optimistic note that Larraín takes adds to Diana’s iconic legacy. In the end, she is simply a mother, a human and not currency. - 5/5 Stars – ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
IGN It may come as a surprise that the story that Spencer, the new Princess Diana biopic by Jackie director Pablo Larraín, most closely resembles is not The Crown, but Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. After all, the psychodrama that stars Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in a career-best performance, is all about letting go of the past and moving forward to the future. But that’s a seemingly impossible task in the House of Windsor, where tradition is valued over everything, and Spencer shines in portraying that in Diana, going beyond her icon status and getting deep on the woman who struggled in this suffocating environment.
It is in this strict climate that we first met Diana, Princess of Wales, who is late for a Christmas weekend event at one of the Royal Family's many estates — which just so happens to be located next to her childhood home. From the opening scene, Larraín frames Diana in a completely different context than the rest of the characters. Where the arrival of the guests at the ancestral estate of Sandringham is methodical, symmetrical, and meticulously timed, Diana is not escorted by a security detail or a driver, but driving alone on the countryside, stopping at a diner to ask some patrons for directions. An oppressive Jonny Greenwood score that mixes baroque with dissonant jazz sounds, meanwhile, creates a cacophony of rhythms and noise.
From the moment Diana steps foot inside Sandringham, Larraín and cinematographer Claire Mathon separate her from the rest of the characters. She’s in constant rebellion to antiquated traditions, with the other two people capable of realizing the absurdity being her own children — who ask why they must open Christmas presents a day before normal kids, or why the heating is never on inside the estate.
Even visually, Diana is kept in a separate world from the rest of the family. Her scenes feel as messy and frenetic as the woman behind the title, using handheld cameras that swirl around and shake as Diana does, and keeping the oppressive Royal Family rigid, unmovable, and distant. Whenever Diana is in the scene, the camera stays fixated on her face using medium angle shots that accentuate the claustrophobia of Diana being alone in such big halls.
Stewart is an absolute revelation as the titular Diana Spencer, giving her one of the best performances of her career and perfectly capturing Diana's mannerisms, while adapting them for her own spin on the character. She goes from a happy woman who finds joy in small things, like just being with her kids playing silly games after midnight, to being haunted by the ghosts of her past and the mockery of her present. Stewart compassionately portrays a woman suffering with an eating disorder, frustrated by the lack of empathy and understanding around her, while being unafraid to go full camp with the theatricalities of the role, as when she imagines herself eating the pearl necklace she is forced to wear for dinner, or shouting to a member of the house staff that she will masturbate in order to send her off.
Larraín continues to excel at finding the humanity inside the icon, with another biopic that refuses to adhere to known conventions or formulas, instead playing with fact and fiction like you're watching a David Lynch movie. In the case of Spencer, the title of the movie should tell you everything you need to know about the film's approach to its subject. This is not the story you know about Diana Princess of Wales, fashion and anti-establishment icon, but about Diana Spencer, the mother of two kids, the woman with simple pleasures that likes to have fun and goes against her terrible mother-in-law and insufferable husband.
Luckily, we don’t have to see too much of those family members. Fans of The Crown, which explores the Royal Family more comprehensively, shouldn’t expect the same treatment in Spencer, as most of the family isn’t seen at all. In fact, only Charles and the Queen get lines of dialogue, and they’re gone as quickly as they are introduced. This is not the likable Queen Elizabeth with moments of humanity and warmth that we've seen in the Netflix drama, but Her Royal Highness, a title more than a person, and a specter that looms over the entire film even if she’s not seen.
Other than Stewart, the only three characters played by big-name actors are members of the house staff. There's Timothy Spall, who plays a butler obsessed with keeping everything according to plan, meaning he’s constantly clashing with Diana; Sean Harris as the chef, who tries to get Diana to comply with all the norms and rules but in a nicer way, reminding her that it will be over in a few days; and then there's Sally Hawkins as Maggie, the only person in the estate to actually show her some empathy and present a vision of a better future. The comparison to A Christmas Carol is no joke, and by the end of Spencer, Diana all but reaches out to us to proclaim "God bless us, every one!" while the Queen is left sighing and whispering "bah humbug."
Spencer is not as accessible a film as Jackie, even if they share many similarities. Like its subject, Spencer is messy in its narrative, jumping around, introducing dream-like elements that don't always add up and threaten to derail the film, but Stewart's phenomenal performance keeps the film grounded in the story of the woman behind the icon. By the end, The Crown is but a distant memory, and all that remains is the joyful and celebratory image of a mother who should have had many more years free of her extravagant, luxurious, and ancient captivity.
Verdict
Spencer is a narratively ambitious film that remixes reality and fiction to get us inside the head of the Princess of Wales, exploring mental illness and past trauma with high camp that captures the suffering of its main character. Kristen Stewart gives a career-best performance while Pablo Larrain cements himself as a go-to director for unique and thoughtful biopics.
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