Princess Diana has been one of the most frequently portrayed and assiduously scrutinized public figures of our time. Since her death 24 years ago, at least a dozen movies, three dozen books, three documentaries, two plays, and two TV series, including CNN’s Diana most recently, have attempted to capitalize on the Anglophone public’s continuing fascination with the former princess of Wales. Now, hardly a year after season four of The Crown, a season the hit show spent on telling Diana’s story, the American film production company Neon, in partnership with other U.S. and U.K. distribution companies, brings us yet another.
This next, newest portrayal of Diana comes in the form of Spencer, a bizarre film from Chilean director Pablo Larrain and British screenwriter Steven Knight that transforms Diana’s life from a figurative horror story into an actual one.
Spencer takes place during the later stages of Diana’s life, when her relationship with the royal family had grown cold and her marriage to Prince Charles even colder. Charles, Queen Elizabeth II, and Charles and Diana’s children William and Harry have gathered at the queen’s country estate of Sandringham in northern England to celebrate Christmas. Diana (Kristen Stewart) is driving there separately. (Her separateness — from the royal family, from her husband and children, and even at times from herself — is a theme that Knight and Larrain spotlight time and again in Spencer, starting with the film’s title, an allusion to her maiden, pre-royal name.) Diana, seemingly lost, goes on a bit of a detour, apparently more interested in exploring the abandoned estate where she had grown up nearby than in joining her family for the holidays. She’s eventually directed back to the royal palace by the royal head chef Darren McGrady (Sean Harris), whom Knight and Larrain make into a relatively significant figure in this story.
When Diana finally arrives, she is hardly even acknowledged by the royal family other than by her children and by the household staff members, who force her into a humiliating ritual of being weighed upon entry. When Diana asks why she must do this, the royal estate staff explains to her that it’s been the palace tradition for many years, essentially telling her if this is what Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had to do, then you shouldn’t have any complaints about having to do it, too. “Her Majesty herself just a second ago sat on these scales,” they tell her. “And she was very insistent that everyone joins in.”
Diana’s liberties, even inside the expansive mansion, are similarly constricted. She must show up for mealtimes and royal family photos and local church services on time, and always with the proper attire. Although she has a well-documented chic sense of fashion, she cannot wear anything she pleases. She must select from a preapproved wardrobe of outfits chosen for her by royal dressers. (Diana’s one respite here is that one of these dressers, Maggie, played with an appealing mixture of compassion and feistiness by the redoubtable Sally Hawkins, is a friend of hers and one of her only real confidants amid a sea of suspicion and high-British passive-aggressive hostility.) Diana can’t simply stroll downstairs for breakfast in a bathrobe to have a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal — she has to come fully dressed, with her hair “set,” and prepared first thing in the morning to sit through a multicourse royal meal. She cannot even go out for an afternoon stroll on the palace grounds without being reminded that she must be back in time for dinner, or else. All work and no play are conspiring to make Diana a pretty dull princess.
When she gripes to Charles about why she — they — must endure all this, he tells her, with an almost shocking degree of coolness and detachment, that in order to survive as a member of the royal family, “you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.” “That you hate?” Diana asks, as shocked as we are. “Yes, for the good of the country.” “For the country?” “Yes, the people. Because they don’t want us to be people. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.” After these displays and exchanges, it’s hard not to feel a tad bit sorry for them, at least for a very, very brief moment, and mutter things to yourself, such as, “Gosh, no wonder Meghan wanted to leave,” before remembering, “Oh yeah, they get to live in multiple palaces and have three catered multicourse meals per day, and they can be on TV just about whenever they want, all without having to work a single day in their lives. I’d probably put up with someone else picking out my clothes for that.”
Spencer might have been a good movie had it kept its focus on the realistic burdens of being a British royal. Instead, it veers off into the surreal, metamorphosing from a period drama into a Gothic horror movie, and not a very good one. Trapped in the Sandringham Estate like Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel, Diana starts seeing things, the ghosts of 16th century royal wives beheaded by British monarchs, and wonders whether she’ll be next. It doesn’t help her fragile sanity that she has to look at a portrait of King Henry VIII every morning at breakfast. Or that she conveniently happens upon a biography of Anne Boleyn in the royal library. A Christmas gift of a pearl necklace from Charles and a foggy, midnight visit to her rundown childhood home across the way are occasions for the filmmakers to take Spencer from the bathetic to the overwrought.
All of this is accompanied by an inexplicably atonal jazz-based score. When our ears aren’t being tormented by these discordant clatterings, they’re being strained by the struggle of trying to make out whatever it is that Kristen Stewart is saying. Stewart, who reportedly trained for six months in an attempt to learn how to replicate Diana’s accent, apparently did not train for long enough. Either that, or she was led to believe that every line Diana ever spoke was uttered in a half-audible whispered slur. Either way, the effect is that you need to make sure to go to a movie theater with subtitles if you want to understand what this version of Diana is saying. Or, better yet, you could not go at all. Word is there’s this really good Netflix series about Diana and the royals called The Crown.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg.
