Through her life and since her death, the world has been seemingly non-stop obsessed with Princess Diana Spencer. These past few years in particular have given us so much Diana content, from her inclusion and portrayal in Netflix’s The Crown, to documentaries about her life and legacy, to now Pablo Larraín’s “fable from a true tragedy,” the film Spencer. In this review, I will try to keep it spoiler light— but then again, how can you spoil something about someone who’s life has been so deeply excavated by the public eye that it somehow became hard to tell where truth ends and fantasy begins?
Which brings me to my first point: it was so smart of Larraín to start the film with the proclamation that the film to follow was a fable. A fable, typically defined as a short story that conveys some sort of moral, frees the movie up from having to be too literal or too realistic. It allowed room for them to take creative license with what was going on in her head. After all, she has passed on from this world so who is to say what was really going on underneath the surface? The way this materialized was in sequences of magical realism in which Diana consumes pearls in her soup, communicated with royals long dead, and may or not have taken wire cutters to her skin. Did these sequences always serve the film? Maybe not. But I don’t take umbrage with them trying to convey her inner monologue in fanciful ways, even if they sometimes only half commit.
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Moving on to the movies structure/design. The choice to make it a slice of life biopic confined to a very specific 72 hours is absolutely genius; the only way biopics should be moving forward (I also loved the employment of a similar framing technique in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs). Three days in particular makes for the perfect three act structure. These sweeping biopics unconstrained by a specific time or event so often don’t work because they try to cover so much of their subjects’ lives which, in turn, results in them not really telling us anything deeper than surface level. Plus, as I mentioned, everyone knows about Diana’s whirlwind of a life due to our ongoing investigation into her private affairs. To borrow an ongoing sentiment from the film, we don’t need her past or her future, we just need to examine the present moment that she was in and that moment here was Christmas holiday 1991.
Now, the movie has some clunky flashbacks and motifs that seesaw between actually really smart and being kind of hokey. I’ll save those for you to discover on your own. However, I will mention specifically, given the parallels of Camilla/Diana and Jane Seymour/Anne Boleyn (King Henry VIII is said to have beheaded Boleyn to be with his “one true love” Seymour and many say Prince Charles drove Diana away with purposeful cruelty so that he could be with his “one true love” and current wife, Camilla Parker Bowles) the use of Boleyn and Seymour in theory is terrifically clever but in practice, was a bit gauche. The films pacing sort of stumbles because of it and some people may find its score (composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) quite jarring and it’s often intimate, visceral camerawork dizzying (though I thought both of these things were highly effective). Therefore, I’m not sure I would anticipate a Best Picture nomination out of this one but it does look extremely beautiful, if a bit muted.
And now for the main event: Kristen Stewart. I mean my god. I actually laughed to myself at one point in disbelief that the woman on the screen in front of me fully embodying Diana Spencer was in fact Kristen Stewart. The physicality, the voice, the accent, the walk— everything—left me transfixed. Frankly, I don’t see a world in which she doesn’t win an Oscar for this role. This is not an impression of Diana, it is an embodying (and if Rami Malek can win an Oscar for doing an impression…let me stop).
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But let me tell you in particular why casting her was so brilliant. She completely humanized Diana. So much so that I actually got quite emotional, strangely, at the films final sequence because I couldn’t help but see young William and Harry and think, “wow, these boys have been without their mother, their biggest fan, for so long.” There is no artifice with Kristen and because Diana, too, couldn’t handle her royal “reality” of artifice, it’s makes for positively inspired casting.
And because of this titanic performance on which the movie stands, we don’t need to devote a ton of screen time to any of the other royals speaking, aside from William and Harry, the only two people Diana genuinely, deeply cares about. The highlighting of who gets to speak in this film speaks volumes about who we are meant to care about. In fact, the queen has one spoken scene, Charles has about one and a half, and Princess Anne has a sliver. The actions of the Royals— sewing Diana’s curtains shut, constantly gossiping about her, giving their unwanted input, quipping about her outfits— tell us all we need to know of their opinion and effect on her. Stewart’s Diana internalizes their actions without having to hear much of their words, allowing the script to be sparse and the subtext to be thunderous. Her face and the speed at which she traipses about the grounds really say it all.
Now to double back on this earlier mention of morals. If we are watching a fable, we should probably end with a moral learn, no? To me, it feels summed up by Diana’s lone verbalized interaction with the Queen. The Queen remarks how fond the paparazzi are of photographing Diana. She follows this up by saying to Diana, “the only portrait that really matters is the one that ends up on the ten pound note.” The Queen then finishes by half-stating, half-questioning, “you understand all you really are is currency.” Diana realizes she never asked to be on the ten pound note, just like she never asked any member of the Royal Guard to die protecting her (I’m alluding here to another conversation Diana has with a staff member at Sandringham Estate). She knows that if she wants to continue living, she needs to know she’ll never end up on the ten pound note. She needs to know her life won’t just be boiled down to being currency. She knows she needs to get out. And somewhere in there, there is a lesson for all of us.
Ultimately, I just know that this film will prove to be quite divisive. People will argue about Kristen Stewart’s performance as they always do and people will argue about the portrayal of Diana and people will argue about the films general lack of a driving plot. But I quite enjoyed my experience watching it and think you should allow yourself another glimpse into the mind of one of the worlds most beloved personalities. You might not find what you’re looking for but you’ll certainly find something worth watching.
