Prefaced as “a fable from a true tragedy”, Spencer is ‘The Anti-Crown’. If the latest season of Peter Morgan’s series is a restrained best-guess at the royal shenanigans involving Princess Diana, Pablo Larraín’s film is a wildly speculative if detached portrait of barely contained hysteria and vulnerability, all infused with flights of fantasy and told with sky-high style. It shares not only thematic DNA with the director’s Jackie — a woman going through a private meltdown in the public eye — but also its prized asset: a stunning central performance. Like Natalie Portman before her, Kristen Stewart gets under the skin of one of the world’s most famous women, at once transformative but never feeling like an impersonation.
After an opening that feels like a well-tooled thriller — a military convoy brings crates of luxurious food to Sandringham — screenwriter Steven Knight imagines Diana suffering through the three-day Royal Christmas as a mixture of weird rituals (Sandringham guests are weighed on giant scales on arrival) and regimented dinners. Through all this, the people’s princess constantly yearns for her life before marriage (her dad’s jacket on a scarecrow, her derelict childhood home). There’s a reason the film is called Spencer.
Her every move is under the watchful eye of equerry Major Gregory (Timothy Spall, excellent), spying on her as she seeks comfort in a fridge and cake, and gaslighting her (or so she believes) by leaving Anne Boleyn: Life And Death Of A Martyr on her bedside, Diana then starting to see visions of the doomed queen. Apart from her kids — William (Jack Nielen) is portrayed as a particularly sensitive soul — Diana’s only crumb of comfort comes from her lady-in-waiting Maggie (a warm Sally Hawkins), whose kindness and support is snatched away by the Powers-That-Be, leading to a fantastic late-in-the-day reunion that drops a huge bombshell.
Stewart is incandescent on the outside while hinting at worlds of turmoil underneath
While there is a terrific spat between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing) around a blood-red snooker table, this isn’t a film about royal bust-ups. Instead, Spencer does a deep dive into Diana’s tottering psyche, from acts of bulimia to scoffing down pearls that have fallen into her soup to a montage of iconic outfits that highlights her ache for happier times. Throughout, the craft is mightily impressive. DP-of-the-moment Claire Mathon’s camera stalks Stewart down corridors like it is the Overlook Hotel, with Jonny Greenwood’s score flitting between orchestral tumult and skittish free-flowing jazz. But there’s something in Larraín’s approach that is remote. Spencer never moves you like you feel it should.
Still, Stewart’s performance is remarkable. Whether it is an off-hand line (“Leave me now. I want to masturbate”) to bigger moments where she challenges the royal tradition of pheasant-hunting by marching in front of the rifles, the actor, who has her own ambivalent relationship with fame and scrutiny, is incandescent on the outside while hinting at worlds of turmoil underneath. In her best performance since Personal Shopper, she takes an icon and deftly makes her human.
