Review: ‘Spencer’

In Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) tells Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) that she must craft two personas. “There has to be two of you,” he advises, “there’s the real one and the one they take pictures of.” 

But since her death in 1997, many more than two Princess Diana’s have emerged. There’s the “People’s Princess,” eulogized by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” and upheld by Gen X as a sort of salt-of-the-earth saint. Then there’s Instagram’s Di, smiling and wearing bike shorts, a big sweatshirt, and scrunch socks. More recently, Netflix has offered up two new Diana’s: in 2020’s fourth season of The Crown, Emma Corrin’s sweet, big-eyed ingénue and, this year, in Diana: The Musical, a painfully earnest musical princess (Jeanna de Waal). And with Spencer, Larraín and a sharply-enunciating Stewart add another Diana to the canon.

The film takes place at the Queen’s country estate over Christmas weekend, 1991. The estate has scales placed in the foyer, so that all royals may weigh themselves at the beginning of Christmas weekend and again at the end and prove the happiness of the holiday by gaining three pounds over three days. But circumstances are far from happy. It’s ten years after Charles and Diana’s fairytale wedding. Their marriage has completely soured, Diana is struggling with near-constant attacks of bulimia, and the royal family is plagued by tabloid photographers hungry to report bad tidings. The plot is split into thirds, not only by the days of the holiday (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day) but also by the days’ respective accoutrements: the mandated traditions, like the rule that forces young Princes William and Harry (delightfully played, respectively, by Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) to open their gifts on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning; the elaborate menus announced daily by Royal Head Chef Darren (Sean Harris) downstairs and by stern head of staff Major Gregory (Timothy Spall) upstairs; the rainbow carousel of couture that Diana’s dresser and only adult confidante, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), has laid out for the princess and tagged with the appropriate occasions — Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day church, Christmas dinner. 

This three-part structure creates a sense of controlled, forced indulgence; a tightly-planned holiday that is stifling in its traditional, excessive consumption and maze-like estate setting. While Spencer naturally invites comparison to Jackie, the Jackie Kennedy biopic Larraín made in 2016, the film’s indulgent parade of dressing and dining positions Diana not as a British version of Jackie Kennedy but as a kind of inverted Marie Antionnette. Like Antionnette, Diana was thrust into royal life through marriage. But unlike the girl queen, Spencer’s Diana does not revel in the luxury surrounding her — she destroys it. To accomplish this destruction, Stewart performs Diana with a deep physicality, using her body as a devastated and devastating swirl of action.

Midway through the film, the Queen (Stella Gonet) tells Diana that one day she will realize that, as a royal, she is currency. But Stewart’s Diana becoming a currency seems impossible; she’s too defiant, too active. In some scenes, Diana marches to her bedroom with a determined shimmy. In another scene, Diana hurls her body down a gold-trimmed hallway, sending a lamp that is surely an antique crashing to the floor. When faced with barbed wire keeping her from her childhood home, she requests wire-cutters and slices through the spiky strands fearlessly, her white ball-gown hem sinking into the mud at her feet. 

Diana’s most striking desecrations center around a bulbous strand of pearls that Charles gives her for Christmas. The necklace becomes a sort of proxy for the prince after we learn that Charles gave his mistress the exact same pearls. At Christmas Eve dinner, in a scenario imagined by Diana, the princess rips the pearls from her neck, sending them plunging into her pea soup. This is the only time in the film in which we see Diana eat publicly and with abandon; she frantically devours the soup and the pearls, biting down on the gems with satisfying crunches and dribbling green liquid out of the corners of her mouth. Later, Diana destroys the pearls again, this time in reality. On Christmas, Diana sneaks from the Queen’s estate to her boarded-up childhood home where an apparition of Queen Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson) encourages her to finally rip the pearls from her neck. In perhaps the film’s most climactic moment of destruction, Diana forcefully breaks the strand, the glittering explosion of pearls positioned in striking contrast against the somber, decaying walls of the home where Diana lived before becoming Princess Diana.

Spencer’s Diana rebels against the immaterial symptoms of the royal family, too. She arrives late to royal events, she changes up the order of her outfits, she doesn’t gain three pounds over the weekend. At the end of the film, she even halts the customary Boxing Day pheasant shooting, whisking away her sons in her open-top convertible and driving them back to London to enjoy a greasy, drive-thru meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

These and other scenes of Diana wreaking havoc on the institution of the Crown create a portrayal of a Di that is always in motion. Reinforcing the film’s active, messy Princess, director of photography’s Claire Mathis chose to shoot Spencer on 16mm film, alternating between textured long shots and close-ups with a swooning, dipping, and diving camera that is rarely static. Johnny Greenwood’s free jazz-reminiscent score, too, speaks to spirited movement. But costume designer Jacqueline Durran’s luscious, seemingly endless roster of costumes — silken blouses, high-waist denim, diaphanous gowns, and plenty of Chanel tweeds and boucles — are perhaps the most dynamic element of Spencer’s entire production, outside of Stewart’s performance. Coupled with Diana’s restless body, the costumes’ varying textiles and hues dominate each frame. A montage of Diana through several ages, from child to young ballet dancer to royal adult, is a sartorial feast for the eyes as Diana runs, literally, through a highlight reel of her life, wearing pieces that are not recreations but are reminiscent of Diana’s real-life looks.

Of course, there are moments in Spencer when Diana’s rage, measured against the arbitrary restrictions that tie her down, feels exaggerated. The requests that the royals make of Diana are trite, even ridiculous — in Spencer, arriving late for afternoon sandwiches is elevated to a crisis of the highest order. It’s Diana’s awareness keeps the film from veering into something farcical; “The holy sandwiches,” she says, snickering, after arriving late for tea. The resulting film teeters between high art and camp with admirable balance. Spencer’s Diana is down-to-earth, in on the joke, and delightfully destructive — even as the Royal Family’s irrational restriction, her husband’s infidelity, and her own struggle with bulimia threaten to destroy her. This Diana differentiates herself from the institution that oppresses her by making a dent in its ornate trappings. She takes up space. She does damage.