A clever balance of dream, nightmare, and idolatry
The poster for the movie Spencer shows a woman lying prostrate wearing a fanned-out brocade ballgown. She could be praying or weeping or dying. Great dress, great ad, but when you finally see the film, starring Kristin Stewart as the unhappy Princess Diana Spencer Windsor, you realize its trick. The glamorous pose that seemed to idealize sorrow turns out not to be a lavish portrait of contrition or succumbing at all; it’s a shot of Princess Diana’s bulimic spew at a toilet bowl. The title “Spencer,” overlapped in plain print, is the height of cynicism, condensing into a single icon the tabloid version of Lady Di’s travails. It’s an image worthy of peak 1960s Esquire-magazine sarcasm, like the George Lois cover of Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian pierced with arrows.
In the movie, Diana’s victimhood is presented as “a fable from a true tragedy.” That’s screenwriter Steven Knight’s way of saying this is a fairy-tale martyrdom, combining the dream that Lady Di represented with the nightmare that completes it. Knight has written some of the most impressive analyses of British character in this century (Dirty Pretty Things, Amazing Grace, Burnt, Locke). But this time, the cultural self-scrutiny is, like that poster, rather too inclined toward disillusionment. As portrayed by the ever-dolorous Stewart (the movie star who seems to never want to be on the red carpets she’s always walking down), Diana symbolizes the demoralization of contemporary Great Britain.
Director Pablo Larraín, the Chilean cynic whose niche is sentimentalizing Western icons (Tony Manero, Jackie) uses Stewart’s sulky manner with precision. Her blond dye-job is better than in Seberg (no dark roots) and each close-up of her perfectly sad, cloudy eyes make even the famous Diana poses seem genuine. Caught between being deferential and defiant, she speaks in a hushed voice as if afraid to talk loudly, always trying out words that are never right. Stewart and Larraín give a pulse to Knight’s schematic presentation of royal-family imprisonment.
The idea of showing Diana’s alienation (going from wealthy privilege to even wealthier privilege) by her trying to escape, driving without a chauffeur or security detail, doesn’t make sense. It only works in moments of juvenile petulance when she plays a candlelight “Soldier, best thing about Christmas!” game with her sons William and Harry. They’re three lost children.
A good scene with aloof husband Charles (Jack Farthing) warns about empathy, service, and sacrifice that Diana hears only as male chauvinism. It’s not so much a characterization as complicity with the Diana-victim myth, which, like other feminist myths, is predicated on privilege: a dream of the most famous woman in the world imagining she’s not.
Knight and Larraín’s second-best gambit is the casting of Mike Leigh actors Timothy Spall and Sally Hawkins in supporting roles to suggest needed political consciousness. Spall as former spy turned royal equerry offers the princess plain talk and good sense: “We all make an oath to the crown. It’s the oath that you believe.” But Hawkins gets defeated as the plain-Jane lesbian maid who embodies that aberrant “people’s princess” passion. Knight’s worst idea is resurrecting the ghost of Anne Boleyn to haunt Diana (an assassination conspiracy theory), but Stella Gonet as Queen Elizabeth nearly redeems it when advising, “The only photo that matters is the one they take of you for the ten-pound note. It’s currency.” That clever pragmatism destroys the silly, bratty self-justification of Diana’s first, phoniest line: “Excuse me, I have no idea where I am. There are no signs.”
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At its worst, Spencer courts popular sentiment to embarrass the monarchy. The scene of Diana wearing the iconic white ballgown, traipsing across a moonlit field toward a concertina fence, wire cutters in hand, is a rebellious fairy-tale image (shot by Claire Mathon, who photographed Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire). But it’s weak compared with the climax of Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987) where Tilda Swinton performed an emotionally extravagant scene of cultural rebellion: ripping silk roses from a crinoline wedding dress, a large pair of couture scissors at her own throat. Twirling in a paroxysm of political unrest, she wasn’t a cossetted princess but an artist on fire — her self-immolating Englishness was daring, sophisticated, and brutal.
Nothing in the current crop of hypocritical royal-family TV series, tabloid gossip, and perverse historical dramas like The Favourite is so potent.
Advertised as a “fable,” Spencer is based on a lie, the same media persuasion that makes celebrities of Eva Perón and Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden (although never actual photographer’s model Melania Knavs Trump). Spencer itself is only a half-bad movie, promoting idolatry for a public that has lost respect for tradition and that has no sense of duty or sense of occasion.
