In Spencer, director Pablo Larrain clearly wants you to see Princess Diana as a woman trapped in an uncaring, archaic system, deprived of love and close to madness. Unfortunately the Diana of this bizarre fantasia actually comes off as a spoiled sourpuss who’s pissed off at having to spend another Christmas with the in-laws.
Larrain doesn't do traditional biopics. His 2017 film Jackie focused in on Jacqueline Kennedy's life in the days just following her husband's assassination; it was a psychologically astute and keenly observed study of a woman in the grip of post-traumatic stress. But that film succeeded because it was rooted in actual events and had some connection to reality.
With Spencer, Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight have thrown objective reality out the window and turned a Christmas holiday with the royal family at Sandringham into a psychological horror film with Diana as a tormented woman losing her grip on sanity. It's all tense, jarring string music on the soundtrack, and castle rooms filmed to look ominous and imposing. Even the ghost of Anne Boleyn shows up to convince Diana she is doomed.
Anyone who's watched The Crown already knows that the Windsors are a pretty insular clan who follow an odd but firmly entrenched series of rituals with unquestioning fealty. As depicted, both in that series and in Spencer, those rituals seem fairly harmless. Is it really such a chore to eat at pre-arranged meal times, show up for an annual family photo, go to church with your mother-in-law? No one in the family comes off here as menacing or unconcerned about Diana, just a little stuffy. Even Prince Charles tries, not unkindly, to help Diana understand what she signed up for in the way of duty and sacrifice. (When he tells her she has to be able to do things she hates, that’s not being mean. That’s pretty much the definition of adulthood.)
The lesson doesn't take. Diana continues to obsess about Anne Boleyn's fate and to act out a series of petty rebellions and clueless disruptions: A refusal to show up on time for any meal. Complaining about having to exchange presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. Entreating the estate's chef to talk with her about how dreadful pheasant hunting is when that poor guy is just trying to make sure the Christmas dinner is served on time.
In real life, Diana was hurt by her reputation within the family as being unstable, and Larrain unwittingly gives credence to that characterization of the princess. In addition to the Anne Boleyn stuff, she deliberately injures herself with a wire cutter, wanders the grounds alone late at night, and deliberately leaves her curtains open while undressing - even after she's been told that tabloid photographers with long-lensed cameras have been snapping pictures of her.
About that pheasant hunting... Maybe it's me, but an opposition to pheasant hunting is not the hill I'd choose to die on in a quest to bring the monarchy to its knees. For one thing, it's not necessarily an aristocratic or wasteful endeavor. I grew up in an area of rural Indiana where hedgerows in the fields made for an excellent pheasant habitat. My father and uncles shot pheasants every year; I watched my mom pluck their feathers and clean their carcasses in our kitchen. My family and I ate those pheasants, too, which was helpful when the grocery budget was tight. Stag hunting, with its apparent objective of providing trophy heads to hang in castle rooms, seems far more offensive to me. But then, Peter Morgan has pretty much worked that "dying stag as metaphor for threatened monarch" to death in both The Queen and The Crown. Maybe that's why Larrain chose to focus on pheasants.
"But how is Kristen Stewart's performance as Diana?" you may be asking. Stewart is too good an actress to be bad, but her utter lack of resemblance to the princess is jarring, especially with the memory of lookalike Emma Corrin's brilliant work on The Crown so fresh in our memories. They didn't even take the trouble to give Stewart contact lenses to transform her pale green eyes into Diana's famously big baby blues. She gets the mannerisms and voice right, however, and ultimately just about gets me on Diana's side. But not quite.
Everything we know about Diana that makes us sympathetic to her plight is missing from Larrain’s film. There is virtually no mention of the charity work to which she was so devoted and even less evidence of her famously empathetic and caring personality. Charles’ infidelity is obliquely referenced while Diana’s extramarital affairs appear not not to have happened at all. By limiting the action to three days at a sprawling estate and reducing the conflict to just Diana’s resistance to hoary rituals, Spencer reduces the real tragedy of its heroine’s life to an isolated episode of despair, to be solved with fast food and pop tunes in the final scene.
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