Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 57 minutes
Director: Pablo Larraín
Quick Impressions:
We got the strangest preview package with this movie. After a few trailers played, I began to worry that we had wandered into the wrong auditorium. This sense only intensified with time. Then as the movie started and I saw that it had played at the Venice Film Festival, I decided, “This is probably right, after all.” But I still wasn’t completely sure. Up until the moment the actual title, Spencer, appeared on the screen, I still had an inkling of doubt, an uneasy feeling that perhaps we were now watching a horror movie by mistake.
In fact, we were watching a horror movie on purpose. Spencer is a film about Princess Diana spending an uncomfortable Christmas at Sandringham with the royal family. It is also a horror movie.
On the way home, my husband noted, “I have a few things to say. Near the end of the movie, when a song played in the car—that felt like the first scene of the movie to me. You know how sometimes you get this tense, disorienting flashback, and then the movie starts? I watched that whole thing waiting for the movie to start. The whole thing was the tense, disorienting flashback.”
I understood exactly what he meant and replied, “I have one thing to say. That movie was just like Rosemary’s Baby.” (It really is! I’ve never seen another film that replicates the general mood of Rosemary’s Baby so perfectly.) (I guess Hereditary also reminded me vaguely of Rosemary’s Baby at moments, but that one’s got a pervasively unsettling vibe going on, too.)
“Even though I liked it,” my husband went on, “I thought it was slow.”
“I thought it was relatable,” I replied.
He said, “I wondered if you might.”
I’m surprised he had to wonder! Though I’m sure writer Stephen Knight (who also wrote Eastern Promises) and director Pablo Larraín didn’t know, Spencer could have been subtitled How Sarah Felt in the Autumn Months of Her Freshman Year of College. I’m not being glib. I have no private insight into the mind of Princess Diana, but while watching every scene of this film, I thought, “I know exactly how she feels.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything that so perfectly captured the way I felt just before I left college on a medical withdrawal at the end of my first semester. I haven’t been to Christmas at Sandringham (of course), but I have lived a crushing reality that felt just like the one this film invites us to share.
My college campus was full of cavernous rooms with high ceilings lit primarily by natural light that streamed in through the immense windows. After the time change, darkness seemed to close in on me and swallow me up. Before long, my friends would notice me checking out of dinner conversations to stare vacantly out the darkened windows with my knees pulled up to my chin, slowly eating fruit cocktail with my fingers. Then I stopped eating. (That’s not a thorough rundown of what happened to me (obliviously!) but you can watch this movie and get an idea of how I experienced daily life at that time.) I’m sure quite a lot of people have also experienced reality in the way Diana does in Spencer. I would expect this film to resonate strongly with anyone who has struggled with a mood disorder, anxiety, other mental illness, or a seemingly hostile environment. You don’t have to be the Princess of Wales to feel an emotional connection to Diana in this film.
The Good:
Spencer is the best film I’ve seen in some time, especially in one particular aspect. The way the film lets the audience share Diana’s nightmarish reality is both brilliant and baffling. At least, I found it baffling. I sat there realizing more and more with every new scene, “I have no idea how to make a movie!” (I’ve written novels since forever, but creating something like this on the screen—I would have no idea where to start!)
Kristen Stewart’s lead performance is good, probably her career best (that I’ve seen), but I was far more impressed by the film around her. I kept wondering, “How is the director creating and sustaining this mood?” (I wouldn’t know how to do it!)
The reality we’re shown in the entirety of this film works sort of like free indirect discourse in a novel. We’re not seeing what Christmas at Sandringham was like. We’re seeing what Diana’s experience of Christmas at Sandringham was like. Kristen Stewart’s moving performance helps us see this (and so do the sometimes chilling performances of the supporting cast, including Stella Gonet’s turn as the creepiest Elizabeth II I’ve ever seen on screen. Her glassy-eyed menace is one clue we get that what we’re seeing is Diana’s perception of events, not objective reality (if there even is such a thing!))
Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling score also contributes to the film’s eerie mood. (I was just thinking about how unsettling Greenwood’s scores can be, actually, because I’ve been fixing the formatting on some of my older reviews (that didn’t migrate correctly from an earlier blog), and I just reread my old review of The Master in which I raved vaguely about Greenwood’s score (as I am wont to do). (I probably should take some kind of music class so that I can articulate the way these scores make me feel.)
The cinematography (by Claire Mathon, also cinematographer of Portrait of a Lady on Fire) perhaps contributes to the film’s unique mood even more than the score. The camera always seems to be where we least expect it, showing us stuff from unorthodox elevations. (Actually I don’t know what makes an elevation unorthodox, just that the camera is all over the place in this movie, down on the ground, up in the air. This may sound odd, but as I watched, the cumulative effect of the cinematography and score was so powerful that I started trying to figure out how it was being achieved. I’d ask myself, “What instruments do I hear? Where is the camera now?” I felt such a powerful reaction to what I saw and heard that I developed the overwhelming urge to dissect everything. The movie works so well (in terms of creating the eerie vibe it’s going for) that I began to want to know why and how it was working. (Writing a novel is comparatively so simple! You use words to achieve every effect.) (I mean, I suppose you can also use rhythm and punctuation, but you don’t have to scheme up a way to bring all these disparate elements together to make the audience feel something before the characters even show up!)
The supporting cast itself is a bit unsettling because you have two very well-known, recognizable actors (Timothy Spall, who seems worthy of some Oscar attention of himself, and a very sympathetic Sally Hawkins) and then a bunch of people who seem vaguely familiar (especially Sean Harris) but you can’t quite recognize them. (At least that was my experience.)
I also found myself repeatedly feeling sorry for the non-preferred woman sent to dress Diana because she can’t help it that’s she’s been sent to dress her.
Best Scene:
“I didn’t know what to think after that scene with her necklace and the soup,” my husband said in the car.
Eagerly, I gushed, “That was my favorite scene in the whole movie!”
I love that scene so much. It may be my favorite scene from any movie this year. (But don’t get too excited. I haven’t seen that many movies this year.) First of all, we can never be completely sure exactly what is real as it’s happening. We also get a brilliant dramatization of how Diana feels (and we get those musicians on strings!).
Her scene in the kitchen is significant, too, because it’s one of the only times we get confirmation from the movie that her perception might be significantly off. (I mean her conversation with Sean Harris, not her earlier moment in the pantry with Timothy Spall, though that reveals a lot about Diana, too.)
Best (In)Action Sequence:
Charles and Diana’s argument in the billiard room (or wherever they are) shows us so much. First of all, I love the disconnect between them. They’re on opposite sides of the table. He doesn’t get her at all, and he doesn’t care. (And at a certain point, she doesn’t care, either.) On a story level, I absolutely love his implication that she’s having an affair. It shows that he does not understand her at all. I feel a connection to Diana here. I can imagine someone suggesting that I was off somewhere lazily having a casual affair. How shocked would they be when I replied, “For your information, I was wandering around lost in a field, and then I started undressing a scarecrow!” (But people who really have been wandering around lost in a field don’t usually explain themselves well. Here, Diana does not explain herself at all.)
I also love that she picks up the ball, inviting the audience to wonder what she might do with it. (I know what I would do. And apparently, my husband would do the same thing.) What she actually does really highlights the odd unreasonableness of the royal family. They consider Diana so wild, reckless, and out of control. In fact, most of the time, she’s highly controlled. Their standards of self-restraint are irrationally high.
This scene is good, too, because it foreshadows what happens later at the top of the stairs.
Most Oscar-Worthy Moment, Kristen Stewart:
I’ve never exactly been a fan of Kristen Stewart, but she is a good actress. I’ve seen her give a number of good performances, so I’m a bit unclear about why some people detest her so much and think she can’t act. (Is it just because of Twilight? Is it because of some personal scandal? (I started to list several, trying to guess, then realized that’s not exactly fair to Stewart. Plus it seems disingenuous of me to say, “I don’t dislike Kristen Stewart! Why on earth do other people think badly of her? Is it [and then list every single potential scandal of her entire life]?” Do people even dislike her anymore? Am I just making that up?)
At any rate, I liked her a lot in Panic Room and Still Alice, and she disappears into Princess Diana. (Sometimes she sounds a bit more like Hermione Granger than Princess Diana, but she usually sounds like Princess Diana (and she never sounds like Kristen Stewart!).) After watching this, it’s hard to imagine her not getting a nomination for Best Actress this year.
My husband likes her best in the candlelit scene with William and Harry. There is something very natural and unaffected in Diana’s interactions with her children.
Best Scene Visually:
The part with the wire cutters (inside the room) is certainly memorable.
The idea that Diana has to go through that weighing ceremony is so disturbing, too. Every time she sits on the scales, you wonder, “Who finds this fun?”
The Negatives:
There are times when Princess Diana suddenly starts looking like Kristen Stewart. This wouldn’t be a problem (since I’m aware that Stewart isn’t really Diana) except that most of the time, she looks nothing like Kristen Stewart. I’m not sure if this is some problem with her make-up, if it has to do with lighting…
Actually while writing that sentence, I’ve realized that it probably does have to do with lighting. Looking back, almost every time that I noticed Stewart’s own face shining through, she was outside in natural light.
She’s also very short. Sometimes Diana’s hair looks wider than Stewart is tall (not literally, but that hairstyle doesn’t seem to work as well as it would if she were a little taller). (This is a stupid complaint, so please disregard it. Can you imagine being on a jury that gives out film prizes and hearing one of your fellow jurors suggest, “Well, perhaps her portrayal would have been more convincing if only she were tall enough to accommodate the width of her hair!” (If the actress didn’t win the award, you could always console her by repeating that remark and noting that some of the jurors are idiots.))
As my husband noted, the film is slow—in a way. (I didn’t consider it slow because I was obsessively intrigued by how quickly and thoroughly it made us feel its pervasively unsettling mood. Nothing needs to happen. Nothing can happen. She’s trapped. That’s the whole point. The only thing she can do is leave—and when she does, we emphatically feel the relief) (although it’s sort of ominous, of course, to see her driving off wildly in a car).
This brings up another point. I wonder what William and Harry think of this film. (I don’t care what Charles thinks—unless he’s reading this review. With the thought that he could be, I will say nothing further about him because I know he prefers not to have his affairs discussed.)
The only other thing I’ll say is that I strongly didn’t like the scene in which we see Diana running and running and running, always in different clothes. I felt that was taking things too far. What I mean is, this is a very artistic film, but that scene feels artistic in a showy, artificial way. The scene may work for others, but it didn’t for me.
And now for self criticism. I wish I knew more about the Windsors. I probably do know more about them than average (especially now that the Google news app on my phone delivers me fifteen stories about them every day. It started doing that last year for reasons unknown. By now, I’ve zombie scrolled through an awful lot of information.) I’ve always liked William and Harry, and I’m an Anglophile in general, but I don’t feel I really know any member of this dynasty in the way that I know (say) all the Tudors. I’m vaguely curious about how much of this film is true. (I would especially love to know if Diana actually thought she was being haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn). (If she did, how ironic and disturbing that the tortured ghost of a murder victim was kinder to her than pretty much anyone else in the house!) I don’t know how much of this film is true. Of course, the feeling that it evokes is true. To me, that matters far more.
Overall:
To a degree, this may be a character study, but it’s more like a study of a character’s mood, and even though it’s based on historical events, I still view it as essentially a horror movie of sorts. (Everyone in this house hears everything! They’re always watching, too. Escape isn’t easy.) Kristen Stewart disappears into the role of Diana (unless she’s in the wrong lighting). She may win an Oscar. I, however, was even more impressed by the way the film so quickly establishes a pervasively unsettling mood and how thoroughly it maintains it. Though a bit draining to watch, Spencer is a very good film. If you wish you were a princess, watch it immediately. It will disabuse you of any such ridiculous notion within the first five minutes!