Spencer

SPENCER   ***

Pablo Larraín

2021

IDEA:  During her visit to Sandringham Estate on Christmas weekend in 1991, Lady Diana find herself uneasily navigating tensions with her cheating husband and his family.

BLURB:  As conceived by Steven Knight and Pablo Larraín, Spencer is something of a ghost story; it presents an ossified, fog-shrouded Sandringham Estate symbolically haunted by the memory of one of the modern Crown’s most publicized victims. Here, the People’s Princess is not radiant celebrity, but a despondent girl trembling in designer clothes and slumped on the bathroom floor retching over a toilet, a body and mind visibly depleted by the soul-sucking institution of the royal family and its stringently fusty codes of conduct. Kristen Stewart takes on the often jarring nature of this unromantic depiction by situating her performance somewhere in the gap between reality and the collective imagination; never fully disappearing into the role through typical biopic mimesis, she instead stretches and unsettles the iconicity of Diana to the point where we question how much about her we really know, or have ever been able to. The approach doesn’t so much illuminate her legacy as compound its mystique - this is a self-described “fable” after all. If Spencer is questionable, then, in its strategy of knowingly retrospective (and revisionist) portraiture, it’s more straightforwardly effective as a harrowing, expressionistic account of the psychological state of someone being slowly suffocated by social expectation and public scrutiny. The strings and organs of Jonny Greenwood’s score constrict around Claire Mathon’s gorgeously fragile images like the pearls around Diana’s neck; there’s room to roam but nowhere to escape the vice-like grip of demanding eyes. Crucially, Spencer lets its heroine, and us, come up for air in the denouement, giving Diana a valediction transcending her tragic fate.