Review: For all its artful presentation, "Spencer" is a misfire
Saturday, November 6, 2021 at 5:02PM
NATHANIEL R in Kristen Stewart, Oscars (21), Pablo LarraĆ­n, Reviews, Royalty Porn, Sally Hawkins, Spencer, Timothy Spall

by Nathaniel R

A woman driving alone stops at a diner along the road to ask directions. She’s lost which is as common a problem as it gets. In any usual circumstance this would go unnoticed by other patrons but this is not a usual circumstance and this woman is far from common, and no Commoner at that. The whole room stops to gawk at her. This clever gambit early in Spencer sets Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) immediately apart from humanity. A elegant but sterile aerial shot from the gifted cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) futher isolates her when she reaches that destination. She’s just a tiny figure about to be swallowed up in an imposing estate (Sandringham House, to be exact).

While the opening scenes of Spencer are promising and mobile, and the craft of the filmmaking as rich as you’d expect from the Chilean master Pablo Larraín, Spencer stops abruptly in its tracks at the estate...

Oh sure the camera still glides beautifully and Diana spins out or races about within the confines of the frame, but we are now frozen in place alongside this woman who would rather be anywhere else. The movie will take place over a single weekend and though the conflict is a doozy, and all stories need those, there’s no story but the conflict and hanging question; Will she stay or will she go?

If you’ll allow an overused metaphor — and you should since this movie shamelessly loves the big visual metaphors... I can’t with the scarecrow! — Diana is a bird in a cage. Or, rather, though I’m not sure the movie wholly acknowledges this, a not always fragile bird who willingly flies into a giant gilded atrium, causes all sorts of chaos in the flight patterns therein and constantly chirps about the unlocked cage she’s flown into.

Princess Diana has always been the kind of woman that was more of an idea  to people than another actual human being. To its credit Spencer knows this — and bluntly discusses it—  but the movie also falls into the same trap. It has a few ideas about Diana (not all of them flattering) but purposefully removes her from reality placing her in  “a fable”. This Diana is not a person at all but a Performance of a Storybook Character. The movie them is just a famous woman that people love to project onto playing another famous woman that people aggressively projected onto during her life. (Good meta-casting - we wholly admit that). The talented Kristen Stewart (see Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper) is winning ecstatic praise for this star turn (and probably some trophies) so my personal devastating Spencer tragedy is that I cannot join the chorus of hosannas. That sounds self-absorbed on purpose; the movie invites the construction of mountains from molehills.

Stewart deploys her own familiar but fascinating physical discomfort with stardom into the role quite well, but her voice-work drove me mad. It’s so self-conscious and whisper-breathy that it's as if Stewart is playing an idea of how Nicole Kidman might have played Princess Diana while simultaneously trying on an accent for size. Stewart’s committed but ultimately one-note performance (she starts the movie peeved, paranoid, and deeply unhappy and mostly stays that way throughout) further amps up the self-pitying hysteria of the POV filmmaking — sort of but not exclusively Diana’s perspectiv. As a result the movie teeters on the edge of camp throughout and sometimes falls right in like a pearl necklace into soup. 

And those poor servants!

We spend very little time with Spencer's vaguely considered antagonists, the Royal Family, and much more with the servants who Diana treats very badly. I freely admit that my sympathies were not with the Princess. Perhaps it was my own years in the hospitality business but I couldn’t help but think about how much extra work for no extra money each and every employee she encountered would have had to do to clean up her messes or smooth things over. And some of them would surely get fired in these scenarios, too, caught between conflicting orders from the moneyed aristocracy whose salaries they are actually pay in taxes and what they earn from those people. Of the servants only Timothy Spall (in charge of the estate), the chef (Sean Harris) and Diana's favourite (Sally Hawkins) are given personalities which is surely the point given our skewered point of view and how closely we cling to Diana.

About this difficult distraction of the servants. One scene in particular inside a food pantry was so cringe-inducing I could barely watch, a psychological horror movie inside a costume drama. I kept thinking of all the man hours of the workers gone to waste and then the extra hours for the person who would have to clean up Diana's mess. 

The movies riskiest gambit is its tonal shift of an ending, the most obvious way in which the movie earns its “fable” billing in the screenplay by Steven Knight (who also, not coincidentally, wrote the camp classic Serenity, 2019). But the shift, whether or not we are meant to take it at face value or as a mental proposition from a troubled woman is unearned and crudely prompted (poor Sally!). The finale is so broadly realized and performed that I stifled a laugh. Perhaps this disconnect between the film proper and the ending is the point but… really?

In short, Spencer didn’t work for me but instead often repelled me. That's a surprise since I often admire Larrain’s thorny uncomfortable movies about prickly, damaged, isolated people (Jackie, Ema, and The Club among them... though Tony Manero, even more than Spencer, turns me all the way off).

Still, credit where it's due. It's a handsome film and ultimately thought-provoking even if the audience is doing a lot of the work for the movie, contrasting this new... object? evidence? ...with their 'partial view' memories of the real thing. Spencer's strongest element is a brilliantly sympathetic side-dish movie that is solely about Diana's eating disorder. All these words and only now we mention the plentiful shots of food! The displays look rich and delicious but so paralyzingly perfect that they’re surely poisonous. Just like Diana's ultra regimented perpetually-surveilled existence.  As a movie about Princess Diana, though, Spencer is self-absorbed and monotonous, like a parody of an great art film rather than the real deal.  C

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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