Bold Vision Explores Princess’s Inner World
Pablo Larraín’s unique “Spencer” imagines the moment Princess Diana escaped her gilded cage, echoing classics about women balancing ambition against happiness
by: Bob Verini
The door to the roadside fish-and-chips stand opens, and in walks the most famous blonde in the world. Every head looks up and every jaw drops. Smiling, diffident, she approaches the counter: “I’m looking for somewhere. I’ve absolutely no idea where I am. … Where am I?”
Everybody knows Princess Diana, or thinks they do. Certainly, the arc of her life — first splendid, then melancholy and finally tragic — is one of the most familiar narratives of our time.
Yet Diana has always eluded full understanding. The true story of our lives resides inside us, in the moral and psychological paths we follow during our allotted time. Diana’s natural reticence, and the privacy strictly demanded by the family into which she married, have left us with little to go on in terms of reconstructing her interior life. There’s testimony of friends and skeptics, brief glimpses in interviews; not much more.
Kristen Stewart’s Diana poses for a holiday photo with the royal family in “Spencer.”
Until “Spencer,” that is. In an unprecedented work of imagination, acclaimed director Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight have forged what they call “a fable based on a true tragedy,” in order to anatomize the private woman behind the public figure. They want us to appreciate her as the Spencer she was, not as the Windsor she struggled but failed to become.
Garnering raves at festivals in Venice and Telluride, their film has taken its place among the best pictures of the year.
Spearheaded by a transformative performance from Kristen Stewart, “Spencer” places us squarely at Diana’s side during three critical days over Christmas in the early ’90s when she made the final break with her marriage and title. But this is no you-are-there docudrama. Rather, it’s an impressionistic collage of sights, sounds and confrontations in which Diana’s in-laws are presented as no less remote and forbidding than the ancestral paintings on the walls of Sandringham, one of the royal family’s private residences located in the countryside of Norfolk, England. And the ghost of Anne Boleyn — an earlier royal wife undone by a husband’s passion for another woman — begins to haunt the princess of Wales’ waking hours.
The film’s earliest moments alert us to expect a mixture of the familiar and the mysterious. A convoy of army trucks rolls along a forest road in the chilly midwinter. Perhaps a Bosnian rescue mission? Close-up on a pheasant in the road, dead on its back beneath the passing wheels. Clearly, no collateral damage will deter this exercise.
Arriving at a manor, pairs of armed soldiers carry heavy green boxes up the ornate steps. Surely they contain ordnance, perhaps to counter a terrorist threat. But no: The boxes are formally opened in the kitchen to reveal enormous quantities of meats, fruits and vegetables, (literally) fit for a queen. Staged by Larraín as a military operation performed with wartime gravity, the spectacle begs the inevitable question: Who in the world could possibly deserve this kind of treatment?
The in-laws offer little solace. “There has to be two of you … the real one and the one they take pictures of,” her husband impatiently spells out. “You have to be able to make your body do things that you hate, for the good of the country.” Her mother-in-law is more succinct: “All you are is currency.” But Diana is not ready to be plastered onto a £10 note. Not yet; not while she has two sons to protect from a similar fate.
In its elegance, and its keen focus on the machinations of power, “Spencer” can stand among many past best picture winners and nominees that take the audience into throne rooms where great decisions are made. Intimate epics like “Elizabeth,” “Nicholas and Alexandra,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Queen” and “The Favourite” are lavishly appointed, even as they critique the politics that support all that luxury. In that vein, Larraín and Knight encourage us to marvel at the corridors and landscaping of Sandringham and its grounds, while offering the most stinging indictment of royal privilege of any major film of this generation. As the future of monarchy is debated in coming years, “Spencer” will likely be found at the forefront of the conversation.
Every aspect of Diana’s life was planned out, right down to the clothes she would wear each day.
Still, Larraín’s film is fundamentally the story of one who never aspired to royalty, nor took kindly to its demands. So, its real affinities lie with the groundbreaking, award-winning stories of women who endeavor to forge their own identities in the face of male domination and prejudice.
Like the title character in “Mildred Pierce,” Diana labors hard and sacrifices everything in service to her children, not least in the suspenseful outdoor climax of “Spencer” at the Boxing Day shoot. As in “All About Eve,” Diana yearns for a balance between ambition and personal happiness. Her hallucinatory confusion conjures up memories of “Black Swan,” while her heartbreak at the insidiousness of class differences would not be out of place in “Parasite.”
Parallels aside, “Spencer” is truly one of a kind, the product of a gifted auteur and his production team. Among its accomplishments is an original Jonny Greenwood score that pulls equally from Tudor chansons and electronic music, as if to echo the clash of traditional manners and modern mores that animates the story. Young Lady Diana Spencer, yearning for a simple life of caring and giving, found herself thrust into a role she was poignantly unprepared — and unwilling — to play. That is her tragedy, told here with delicacy and power. ✤
“Spencer” is an impressionistic collage of sights, sounds and confrontations in which Diana’s in-laws are presented as no less remote and forbidding than the ancestral paintings on the walls of Sandringham, one of the royal family’s private residences.
“Spencer” will go on to explore that question with ruthless exactitude, but first it must introduce someone who exempts herself from all such pomp. We first see her driving herself in an open convertible, security detail left behind, en route to Sandringham by royal decree. Diana’s spirit is as free as the pheasants who make Sandringham’s woods their domain. But this bird has lost her way. Even though she’s in the environs where she grew up, she fumbles with her A-Z road atlas and fumes, “Where the f--- am I?”
As it turns out, she is only a supporting player in a vast drama of ancient tradition, in which everyone is to play their assigned part without demur. All of her costumes are chosen for her in strictest order, though in this theater the curtains are sewn shut to foil the paparazzi’s prying eyes. In a rebellious moment, Diana cuts the stitches open, grasping for even the smallest taste of the freedom for which she longs.
