PRINCESS ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

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.

IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEATING GREEN

Opening this weekend:

The Green Knight--A huge green guy on a horse crashes King Arthur's Christmas Party, inviting any of Arthur's knights to strike him in return for his formidable green battle axe. The condition: one year hence, the assailant must show up at the Green Knight's place and allow him to return a blow of the same severity. Most of the Knights of the Round Table wisely take a pass; the ambitious young Gawain agrees and beheads the intruder, who promptly rises, picks up his own severed noggin, and tells Gawain see you next Christmas.

This, as you may recall from English class, is the set-up for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the anonymous 14th-Century Arthurian poem. It's been filmed at least twice before, including as the kitschy Sword of the Valiant in 1984, with Miles O'Keeffe and Sean Connery as Gawain and Greenie, respectively.

This new adaptation, by the American writer-director David Lowery, tries a more idiosyncratic approach. The story unfolds in an austere medieval look and atmosphere, with the characters skulking around really cold and inhospitable-looking castles, or desolate forests. The stylized imagery often recalls Old Masters religious art; Dev Patel, who plays Gawain, here looks like he stepped out of a Last Supper mural.

And yet the people are entirely and unromantically human. Patel plays Gawain as a typical young man with proximity to power but no real position: not a bad sort, but vain, petulant, reckless, horny and a little entitled (his Mom, played by Sarita Choudhury, is Arthur's sister Morgan Le Fay). Sean Harris plays Arthur with a thick, bumpkin-ish accent (he calls our hero "GAR-win"), and his Guinevere (Kate Dickie) looks like she's escaped from a cautionary TV spot about the dangers of smoking.

Lowery seems to want to show how honoring one's word under all-but-impossible circumstances--like, say, not only submitting to having your head cut off, but undergoing an arduous and dangerous journey to do it--happens in the real world of ordinary people with ordinary motivations, rather than in the idealized world of chivalric romance. It's a daring idea, but the result is a deeply eccentric, borderline campy movie unlikely to please either medieval classicists or fans of the Tolkien and Outlander flicks and Boorman's Excalibur. For one thing, there isn't one decent sword fight in the film; this Gawain is decidedly a lover, not a fighter.

But patient, open-minded viewers will know they've seen something at the end of this slow, exasperatingly fussy movie. Don't misunderstand; it's a challenge, but it's also visually beautiful; it's full of many odd, effective little episodes, like Gawain's encounter with St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman); and the actors generate a surprising degree of eroticism. Lowery's style recalls earlier movies ranging from Rohmer's 1978 Perceval le Gallois to the Peter Greenaway films to Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and even Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet. But it isn't quite an imitation of any of them.

The movie that The Green Knight most recalls, however, inevitably and unfortunately, is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As Gawain trudged through mist-shrouded woods, I kept waiting for The Knights Who Say "Ni" to show up. I would have been glad to see them, too.