Another day, another Di but sorry, Kristen, I just don’t buy this version
Spencer (12A, 111 mins) Verdict: A screech of republicanism ★★☆☆☆
Eternals (12A, 157 mins) Verdict: Seems to last for ever ★★☆☆☆
THE captivating Netflix series The Crown has set a high bar for all screen dramatisations of the royal soap opera, a bar that Spencer regrettably fails to reach. Set on the Sandringham estate during three days over the course of Christmas 1991, with the marriage between Charles and Diana ruptured beyond repair, Spencer, like The Crown, is a work of fiction woven from fact. A caption at the start of the film, portentously declaring it to be a fable drawn ‘from a true tragedy’, does at least imply that what follows is mostly whimsy.
And so it proves, with gold knobs on. Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana as a gibbering, dysfunctional wreck (but in a good way), while Jack Farthing gives us a Prince Charles so callous and cold that he could offer your average Nazi commandant a run for his Deutsche Marks. The other adult royals present only slightly more favourably.
Spencer, set to a score of plaintive strings by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, is a cinematic screech of republicanism.
Director Pablo Larrain has form with tragic female icons. He made Jackie, the 2016 picture about the world’s most famous widow, set in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. And rather like Jackie, Spencer is a romantic fairy tale turned on its head: the fragrant beauty who loses her prince.
Here, though, the subject is not a world-famous widow but a world-famous bulimic — and we are not allowed to forget it.
One of the wackiest episodes comes during dinner on Christmas Eve, when a despairing Diana tears off a pearl necklace identical to one she knows Charles has given Camilla. The enormous pearls then plop into her soup, whereupon she promptly starts scoffing them before later, inevitably, throwing them up.
LARRAIN, and screenwriter Steven Knight, use food throughout as a symbol not just of Diana’s unhappiness but also the family’s absurd imperiousness. in the vast Sandringham kitchens, the head chef (Sean Harris) reminds the staff to abide by a sign reading ‘Keep Noise To A Minimum — They Can Hear You’.
Yes, these royals are like the monsters in the alien-invasion thriller A Quiet Place, only it’s Diana who is depicted as the alien, entirely at odds with the stuffy formality mostly embodied by the Queen Mother’s hidebound equerry Major Gregory (Timothy Spall).
One of those buttoned-up, patrician Scots for whom sex is what they deliver the coal in, the major has been sent from Clarence House to keep a stern eye on Diana, whose outsider status is rammed home from the start when she loses her way driving herself up to Norfolk.
Here is a woman lost in more ways than one, is the unsubtle message. Her only real soulmate is her favourite dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), although even that relationship turns out to be more complicated than it appears.
The film is at its sweetest when showing us Diana’s warm embrace of motherhood, and in truth Stewart does a fine job, nailing the breathy voice and Sloaney accent. At first all you see are the differences, but gradually all you see is Diana, even though Stewart is considerably shorter than the princess was. in fact, the matter of height alone will turn seasoned royal-watchers puce with indignation. The Queen (Stella Gonet) looks as if she’s been stuffing herself with steroids. She is nearly as tall as the Duke of Edinburgh (Richard Sammel), who incidentally seems to spend most of the movie as an elective mute, another spectacular swerve from reality.
The crashing irony of this film, and its greatest flaw, is that in trying so hard to make us feel sorry for Diana, it leaves us feeling more than a little miffed on behalf of the others, especially Charles. Well, it did me
For all his missteps, Charles is no Henry Viii, hard as Larrain hammers the parallels with Henry’s ill-fated queen Anne Boleyn, with whom Diana, we are led to believe, felt a powerful spiritual kinship.
KINSHIP also looms large in Eternals, the latest Marvel blockbuster, during which only the gift of eternal life will stop you looking at your watch, willing the final credits to hove in to sight.
The eponymous Eternals are a band of superheroes created by the Celestials to protect humanity from the Deviants, which is all very well, but there’s surely no need for it to take them quite so long.
Director Chloe Zhao, whose last film was the Oscar-winning Nomadland, gets terribly carried away showing us that she can do outrageous fantasy as well as gritty authenticity, and better still, not at the expense of her liberal credentials.
Thus the Eternals (played by Angelina Jolie and Richard Madden, among others) are diversity-friendly superheroes, varying in ethnicity and sexuality. There is even a split personality and a deaf-mute in their number, to remind us that mental and physical disabilities are not incompatible with living for ever and saving the planet.
The CGi-augmented action whisks us on a dizzying tour through history and geography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Camden Town, in a story that fuses with Greek myth and legend in a way that would be streamlined and thrilling if it wasn’t so bloated and boring.