The private lives of public legends
A famous actress is cosmetically and sartorially transformed into a famous historical figure. The historical figure isn’t inherently very similar to the actress, but the ostensible incongruity of the pair, placed in juxtaposition to each other, opens up possibilities. The film, by way of the actress, will excavate a moment in the past, bringing it into the present to tell us something about then but also about “now”. I could be talking about any number of 2021 films (“Respect”, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”, “House of Gucci”) but this specific foray is about Nicole Kidman in “Being the Ricardos” and Kristen Stewart in “Spencer”, two buzzy recent releases that tread familiar paths of famous women playing famous women. Although ambitious in different ways, neither film manages to become a consistently successful reflection of the lives of real people on the screen. But whether in the immaculate and hollow “Spencer” or the busy and inconsistent “Being the Ricardos”, the women at the centre feel instructive to the fates of the films.
Art will come and go, but the movie biopic lives on forever it seems.
Endless parades of artists pontificating about how some past event really resonates with Our Present Reality can be exhausting after a time, but there is value in thinking of how the past reflects (and refracts) on to the present. It is why biopics are generally at their best when they engage with a particular aspect in the history of the protagonist; a single crevice in a larger structure of a life. And in that respect, both Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer” and Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos” could be immediately compelling. At least in theory. Both films, rather than following a Dickensian birth-to-death format, zero in on a specific moment in the lives of Princess Diana and Lucille Ball to present very different stories about women in the public eye. In “Spencer,” scriptwriter Steven Knight imagines a few days over Christmas in 1991 where Princess Diana begins to unravel in the oppressive company of her in-laws. In “Being the Ricardos”, Sorkin’s script focuses primarily on a week in 1953 when the success of “I Love Lucy” is threatened by a report that Lucille Ball is a communist.
I’m sympathetic to the plight of the much-maligned historical biopic, although that sympathy is often more out of academic interest in the intersections of history and narrative than it is with individual entries. But the descriptor “biopic” often feels like a nonstarter. To imagine any film that features a protagonist who existed as a biopic reveals a nebulous conceptualisation of what a “genre” is. And so many films fall into this casual grouping that it’s no surprise the makeshift genre is judged by its worst offenders. But those worst offenders are plentiful, and oftentimes popular and wildly different. For casual viewers, a biopic can present an easy window into history. They are film narratives uncovering, or retelling events of the past. Audiences get the illumination of an essay or history book with the visual supplements. For performers, I’m less sure what the draw is. One might imagine, when the real person is very famous, it scratches an itch of embodying someone very notable. There is some kind of fascination with being a famous person embodying another famous person. It would explain why every year we watch an endless parade of stars and directors on seemingly endless press cycles drawing parallels to some historical figure reclaimed for the here and the now. But to what end? Why a biopic of this person in this time?
In “Spencer,” our first meeting with the princess, after a brief prologue where we see the Royal family’s Sandringham estate being prepared for the holiday guests, takes pleasures in the biopic as an act of spectatorship. Diana, en route to the estate, finds herself lost and stops at a café to enquire for directions. Claire Mathon’s camera (austere and stately)
shoots Stewart like something out of a magazine. As she stalks into the building, the camera slowly travels down her body from behind. She is a glamorous figure, out of place. The patrons are entranced by her entry, Diana does not notice (or chooses not to notice) the attention and walks up to the counter. She is centred in the frame and Stewart speaks her first intelligible line of dialogue to the camera, almost as if breaking the fourth wall, “Excuse me. I’m looking for somewhere. I’ve absolutely no idea where I am.”
In a better film, the line might be an entry into “Spencer” as an excavation of Diana finding herself. The opening intertitle announces the film as “a fable from a true tragedy.” The word fable feels so right and so wrong. “Spencer” depends on overemphasised abstractions that might announce moralistic fables, but woefully little in its conceptualisation realises any meaning or significance in its intentions. I’ve long thought of Pablo Larraín as one of this century’s most exciting and innovative directors. He’s excellent at excavating the messiness of humanity with an insouciant refusal for simplicity. But for all the technical flourishes in “Spencer” (Johnny Greenwood’s frenetic, amped up score, Mathon’s sleek cinematography, Jacqueline Durran’s glamorous costuming), this film never settles into something that communicates anything nuance. Or anything at all.
Certainly, Knight’s script is the biggest liability here. It sketches a paper-thin idea of Diana and surrounds her with ghostlike figures who retain no significance beyond their conceptual relationship to her: her congenial children, estranged husband, affable chef, or intimidated maid. Everyone here is schematic, including Diana. Larraín’s characters are usually defined by their deft construction: like the mercurial lead in his most recent film “Ema” (a much better version of a mother on the edge of a breakdown); or the ambivalent adman in “No”; or the bereaved Jackie Kennedy in “Jackie”, his only other film in English. Those characters are specific and sharp, their films understand them and they tend to retain a careless surety even amidst the worst of the worlds. Here, Diana is the first of Larraín’s leads who feels perpetually lost. This is not a bad thing in itself, but Larraín never finds the right tone with the hollowness of the script and when joined with Stewart’s effortful performance the union is an unhappy one. Even in her moments of privacy, her presentation of this woman it’s too deliberate, too exacting and Knight’s florid language only problematise any sense of something real underneath. There’s an intriguing aspect to Stewart, an American actress whose “Twilight” days have followed her for more than a decade, thrust into this glamorous role. It is so unlike her, and the transformation is part of the pull here. Stewart has been excellent elsewhere and best in “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” where her ability to act out the process of thinking was so well deployed. But Diana in “Spencer” rarely thinks because the script demands no interiority, so her best quality is gone.
That perception of Diana as trapped in her own film might retain some significance if the film did anything with it, but beyond a safariesque glimpse into a woman suffering and then suffering and then suffering, “Spencer” is indistinct and Stewart is never skilful enough to explicate interiority in the flatness of the script’s characterisation. Her Diana feels like a celebrity trapped in a paparazzi camera’s gaze rather than a woman really revealed to us, or even (especially) to herself. She manages the silences and is best in a moment where she strikes a pose in the film’s most recognisable image (Diana being hounded by paparazzi), but she is felled at every turn when invited to speak. Who is this woman? I couldn’t tell you. And I suspect neither could the players involved. For the first time at the end of a Larraín film, the credits rolled and I was no more edified about any of the characters than when it began. The rest of the cast, trapped playing shadows, fare very badly especially Timothy Spall playing a caricature in the worst of ways.