Opening this weekend:
Spencer--In 2016 the Chilean director Pablo Larrain gave us Jackie, with Natalie Portman as JFK's shattered, furious widow. It was an impressive, well-made film that seemed curiously lacking in any real point beyond providing Portman with an award-bait role. Now Larrain is back with another portrait of an iconic, history-adjacent young woman suppressing her rage behind an expected public docility. Again, the role is nomination-bait, this time for Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales.
The movie calls itself "A FABLE FROM A TRUE TRAGEDY," an elegant way of saying: we speculated freely about real people (which is, of course, true of all historical fiction). It takes place over a Christmas holiday in 1991. Diana is trying to drive herself to the "festivities" of The Queen (Stella Gonet), her already-estranged husband Charles (Jack Farthing) and the whole creepy clan at rural Sandringham House, but she's hopelessly late and lost. "Where the f**k am I?" is her first line, and one suspects there's a double meaning in that.
She's clearly in no mood to spend a second with any of these people except her boys. But as Spencer progresses, we see that this is more than just routine distaste; our heroine is in major psychological distress. Immersed in loneliness, resentment, sexual frustration, bulimia and bingeing, and isolation without privacy, she's teetering on the brink of a serious meltdown. A copy of an old tome about Anne Boleyn on her bedside table doesn't help her sense of well-being.
Larrain takes his time, and gradually this slow, stately, hushed film, with its keening orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood, begins to generate some juicy tension in a way that Jackie never did. Toward the end, there are moments that could easily tip over into camp (which wouldn't necessarily be unwelcome) if not for Larrain's austere style. It's to screenwriter Steven Knight's credit that he doesn't offer us a hagiographic take on Diana's character; she's clearly a bit of, well, a drama queen, and early on you may find her obtuse tardiness as exasperating as Charles and the other Windsor waxworks do. After all, you may wonder, does she think she's the only person in the world who dreads family holidays?
But as the movie progresses, and we get a feel for the oppressiveness of the world into which Diana was swept as a teenager, her plight makes her sympathetic, and ultimately likable. This has a lot to do with Kristen Stewart. Often on the blank, slack-jawed side, Stewart came to life in 2016 in the somewhat overlooked, eerily sexy ghost story Personal Shopper, and this gothic seems to give her a charge as well; her Diana has a desperate eroticism and a sorrowful, self-lacerating anger so deep it frightens her, and those around her.
For a while it also seems as if the movie will be a pure vehicle, with the other characters mere bit players. But a few of them are permitted a candid scene or two with the Princess: Timothy Spall as an unflappable Equerry in charge of keeping her secure (and compliant); the excellent Jacki Nielen and Freddie Spry as her adored young princes; Sean Harris as Chef Darren McGrady. Best of all is Sally Hawkins as Diana's loyal dresser; their scene, laughing together on a beach, has the feel of a liberation from captivity, for both of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment