SPENCER HAS A TEXTURED REALITY

PRINCESS CAUGHT INSIDE CODE OF ROYAL COURT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The beautiful royal flower gets a layer of fragility in the latest take on her personality in Spencer (2021).

Director Pablo Larrain spins the narrative around the Queen’s Christmas festivities held at Sandringdham, along the Norfolk Coast as the marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana has all but come to an acrimonious end.

The film is ultimately a character study of a real life personality with a bit of poetic license in the dramatization of events as well as the use of aesthetics.

Larrain again chooses characters the world knows and then picks the life changing event that no one knows about in detail, but everyone wants to know intimately.

In Jackie (2016) starring Natalie Portman as the widow, Jackie Kennedy, Larrain chooses the weeks following the President’s assassination to study how the woman behind the public image is holding up. The camera follows Jackie from the presidential motorcade and to Air Force One in the blood splattered dress as the President’s body is returned from Dallas to Washington DC.

Similarly, Larrain follows Diana Spencer as she arrives and then spends a lot of time wandering the halls of Sandringham Castle.

Kristen Stewart stars as Princess Diana of Wales. Initially, Stewart cast as the Princess seems a bit odd, but when it becomes apparent that Larrain has been preparing the audience to see Diana in a textured context layered with psychodrama images, the casting of Stewart becomes more reasonable and the character takes on more meaning.

Stewart shows how Diana has come to the ends of her tether, not so much because of anything that is done to her, but that she just does not fit inside the confines of the rules, regulation and customs of the Royal Court, especially with the media outside documenting every step of her way.

Sean Harris does a good job as a head chef, Darren, ever so subtly breaking his typecast as the villain in action spy fantasy films. Stella Gonet does a good job playing the Queen. And Jack Farthing plays a believable Charles. 

But Stewart’s portrayal dominates the film with Diana showing her displeasure by refusing to conform to even the simplest of Royal Protocols, such as arriving for dinner and the annual Royal Christmas photograph before the Queen.

Timothy Spall plays Major Alistar Gregory, a special butler assigned to Sandringham for the Christmas festivities. Diana seems to be followed about a bit by the Major as she enters oscillating scenes of solitude and escape, which are fitting her tragic death in a car accident inside a Parisian tunnel.

Jack Nielsen and Freddie Spry also share a lot of screen time with Stewart as Spencer’s children, William and Harry.

Like everyone else, Diana is shown to be latched into her childhood with major effective trauma ever present based on how she is treated in the present day.

Larrain layers psychodrama backstory logic onto the plot reversal scenes after everyone has begun to accept Stewart as Spencer, and believe Stewart’s interpretation of the biopic part in all but mirror perfect fashion.

The lack of a facial prosthetic to make Stewart’s nose more like Spencer’s nose is the only element really missing in the interpretation of the Princess.

Larrain forces Stewart to act for her credit by making her the focus of the camera for nearly every scene.

A long winding opening sequence is used before the credits to suggest passage inside the fragile psychological make-up of the film’s subject.

Larrain uses the camera well with one scene showing Spencer walking along a row of barren trees in winter next to a waterway. The barren trees overlap with their own reflection, foreshadowing an overlapping backstory to be left along the riverbank in a very focused narrative.

A score is also used, not in every scene, but not so sparingly as to be forgettable, either. Jazz is used initially to establish the internalized chaos of the Princess.

The cinematography at times creates a home movie tone as if everyone watched the Royal Christmas pageant video before taking their part.

Stewart creates a lot of melancholia, but then she keeps the camera interested in her by rolling Diana’s eyes down, and other little mannerism easily recognizable as the Princess.

The one real failing is the script. The audience does not get to hear from her own lips the reason for Diana’s melancholia, other than the sterile routine created by Royal Protocol. Spencer’s inner thoughts are largely kept to herself other than the psychodrama images thrown on top of the storyline.

Spencer is playing in theaters.