Worrier princess
Kristen Stewart as a fraught Diana makes for a riveting portrait.
Kristen Stewart made her name in the Twilight series. She was Bella, the wan human who married into an ancient family of bloodsuckers, bore a child, then happily lived ever after. Some might think having the elfin American playing Diana, Princess of Wales, is a bold move. Arguably, though, it’s typecasting.
In Spencer, her portrayal of the supposed People’s Princess is something disarming. No, she hasn’t got the uncanny thing that Emma Corrin’s Diana displayed to Emmy-winning effect in the most recent season of The Crown.
But Stewart’s brittle, brave, off-kilter and committed performance is the unnerving centre of a film that does for Diana and her in-laws what The Favourite did for poor old Queen Anne and hers. That is, make a weirdly entertaining royal farce. Or, as the film introduces itself as, “a fable based on a real tragedy”. So don’t come here for a history lesson.
But do stay for the sometimes mad, occasionally gothic fantasy – Diana gets a personal haunting and marriage guidance from Anne Boleyn, a woman who can speak from experience – that helps make Spencer riveting. Not everything works, especially the ending, which gives this fable a finale that’s a little too fairy tale for what has preceded it. But it’s a film of canny touches. It wraps up many of Di’s memorable media and fashion moments in one sequence, choreographed to the music of Jonny Greenwood, whose soundtrack is a clash of jazz and prim chamber music.
It would be easy to blame its irreverence on the outsider perspective of Chilean director Pablo Larraín. He has brought his oblique approach to biopics of iconic women before in 2016’s Jackie, in which Natalie Portman portrayed Jackie Kennedy. That was based on and framed by a 1963 Life magazine interview a week after her husband’s assassination. Spencer, though, was written by Brit Steven Knight, whose varied career includes the scripts for films Locke and Eastern Promises and the creation of Peaky Blinders and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Their film takes in just a few days of Diana’s then-unhappy life. It’s set mostly at a Christmas gathering at Sandringham in the early 1990s, a time when the facade of her marriage to Charles was still intact.
An early shot in the basement kitchen shows a sign: “Keep noise to a minimum. They can hear you.” It’s an edict that applies equally to Diana as she rattles about the castle and pops next door to the crumbling Spencer country pile.
Most of her interactions are with them downstairs – Sean Harris’ sympathetic head chef, Timothy Spall’s stern major domo and Sally Hawkins’ dresser and confidante. It’s a good half hour before any other royals appear, and the only ones to figure are the Queen, Charles, William and Harry. Jack Farthing puts his time as Poldark’s resident panto villain to good use as the Prince of Wales, and the scenes between Stewart and the boys ( Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) are thankfully short and mostly sweet.
Along with its occasional flights of fantasy, there are confronting moments showing Diana’s bulimia, acts of self-harm and contemplations of suicide, which go a little further than The Crown has already depicted.
Spencer arrives curiously well-timed when it comes to the addictive Netflix series – the fourth season ended with a despairing Diana during a Christmas at Sandringham. The film goes deeper, darker and stranger into much the same setting and era. But while
The Crown relies on a grudging admiration for the royals,
Spencer is more fascinated with the crumbling institution and giving its most famous, prettiest skeleton a vigorous rattle. It’s certainly Freudian – both Sigmund and Lucian – given the focus on Diana’s psychological state and the unconventional, unflattering, sad portrait it paints. And, of course, none of it really happened this way. But even if you don’t believe a word of it, there’s still something terribly believable about Stewart’s Diana and something fascinating about the strange pedestal Larraín puts her on.
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Russell Baillie