Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Pablo Larrain
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Jack Farthing, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins
After skewering the closest thing America has ever had to a royal
family, the Kennedys, with 2016's
Jackie, Pablo Larrain takes a similarly caustic approach to an actual
royal family with Spencer. If you're the sort of person who orders "The People's Princess"
commemorative plates from the back of Sunday tabloids, you'll probably
want to give Larrain's latest a wide berth, as it's by no means a
hagiography of either the Princess of Wales or the wider royal
family.
Played by a commanding and arguably never better
Kristen Stewart, Larrain's version of Diana falls somewhere
between a doomed blonde in the Laura Palmer mode (there's even an
explicit nod to Twin Peaks when Diana is seen mimicking
the Man from Another Place dance) and the heroine of a gothic
horror.
Nothing is more chilling than the idea of a family get-together over
Christmas. Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight set their
drama, billed as a "fable from a true tragedy," during Christmas 1991,
distilling two decades of hysteria into three days of anxiety. When
Larrain's airborne camera approaches the grounds of the Sandringham
Estate, it echoes how the eponymous prison is introduced at the
beginning of The Shawshank Redemption. A shot borrowed from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with a dead pheasant standing in for roadkill, tells us what Larrain
has in store. This is a horror movie set in Hell. And, of course, Hell
is other people.
The other people in this case varies depending on which corner of the
estate Larrain's busy camera has found. In the downstairs quarters, the
servants, including an army of kitchen staff, refer to the royals as
"they," as though to mention any names would summon trouble like saying
Candyman five times. When the royals speak of "they" it's in reference
to the public they in turn serve.
The nature of servitude is explored here by contrasting the Sandringham
staff, who seem a far more content bunch than the royals. Unlike their
masters, the staff get to clock out. For the royals, their masters are
always watching. Much of the tension comes from Diana's wilful courting
of the spotlight, leading to her curtains being sewn up to keep the
telescopic lens of the paparazzi away from her windows. The royals here
are living in fear of the outside world, like little people kept in a
giant's dollhouse. They're a Punch & Judy show put on for the
British public, and can never stray from their lines, something Diana
insists on by refusing to conform to set rules, placing the whole puppet
show at risk.
Regardless of your feelings towards the monarchy, it's hard not to come
away feeling a little sorry for this bunch. They may have comforts most
of us will never know, but I certainly wouldn't swap places with them.
That's not to say Larrain goes easy on them. The royals are portrayed
here as being either downright mad or very, very sad. The ones who
aren't mad are miserable. The only normal ones seem to be the young
princes William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry). In
a heartbreaking scene, William pleads with his mother to stop acting
crazy, terrified of what she might do to herself while shut away in a
bathroom.
Larrain embraces high camp for the purposes of both horror and humour.
Diana is visited by ghosts both literal and metaphorical. A book about
Anne Boleyn is mysteriously left in her bedroom with the intention of
either gaslighting or enlightening her, and she begins to see the spirit
of the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII. A visit to the crumbling mansion
she once called home wouldn't be out of place in a David Selznick gothic
melodrama, all crumbling stairs and haunting memories. A dinner scene
involving the consumption of pearls sees the film stray into the
territory of David Lynch, while cinematographer Claire Mathon's
steadicam rushes through the corridors of Sandringham in a way that
evokes the Overlook Hotel.
Spencer is surprisingly cinematic for a biopic of an
Anglo-Saxon princess, but for all of Larrain's pulling from the horror
genre and Knight's scabrous dialogue, the film ultimately rests on the
bare shoulders of Stewart. The 31-year-old star is strikingly good here.
It's the sort of performance that makes you lean forward in your seat so
as to better breathe in her presence. As Diana, Stewart is both
transformative and transportative, convincing us we're watching the
doomed royal and that we're momentarily living in her world. I've always
been unconvinced of Diana's people's princess legend, and Larrain has
left me even more confused. Larrain's film keeps an open mind about its
protagonist, but it's truly enamoured of the young woman she's portrayed
by.
