‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín’s Masterly Princess Diana Movie
The director of "Jackie" has made an enthralling drama of Diana's moment of truth and transition.
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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And here’s the beauty part: Right off, we feel as if we’re seeing… Diana . The real thing. Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma. Watching her play Diana, we see an echo, perhaps, of Stewart’s own ambivalent relationship to stardom — the way that she’ll stand on an awards podium, chewing her lip, reveling in the attention even as she’s slightly uncomfortable with it (and even as she makes that distrust of the limelight a key element of her stardom). Mostly, though, what we see in Stewart’s Diana is a woman of homegrown elegance, with a luminosity that pours out of her, except that part of her is now driven to crush that radiance, because her life has become a wreck.
“Spencer” is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s “Jackie,” the 2016 drama in which Natalie Portman brilliantly portrayed Jackie Kennedy during the week following the JFK assassination. I thought “Jackie” was a knockout, and “Spencer,” which also finds its heroine living through a fateful moment of truth and transition, is every bit as good; it may be even better. The entire film is set over the Christmas holiday, about 10 years after the 1981 wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, and it takes the form of a you are-there voyeuristic diary of what Diana was going through as she came to realize that her disenchantment with her life had become defining, consuming.
In the movie, we see a princess, a woman of power and true majesty, who is treated like a child. Major Gregory, played by a disarmingly gaunt and severe-looking Timothy Spall, has been brought onto the premises to keep an eye on her, and his watchful gaze makes her feel like a pinned insect. And Diana’s lady-in-waiting, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is her one trusted confidante — but for that very reason, Maggie gets sent away. There can be no secrets. And there are none. At Sandringham, the walls have ears.
“Spencer” is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance. The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes — the patterned curtains and gilded wallpaper, the carved paneling, the warm light of the chandeliers, the paintings and upholstery and mirrors and knickknacks. And Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions. Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining,” though part of what’s bracing about the movie is that the members of the royal family have come to think it’s Diana who’s the monster. They regard the attention she receives as a threat to who they are, and they’re right. What they’re in denial of is that the media is creating a new world that’s going to squeeze them out.
Yes, she has wealth, comfort, privilege, fame. But life within the gilded cage of the royal family is also stifling. As she explains to her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), that’s because it’s a life that makes time stand still. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.” What she’s talking about is an existence in which “tradition” is code for what has been, and what always will be. (It’s code for a very British kind of control.) There is no room for anything that isn’t tradition. The film presents Diana’s bulimia with disarming frankness (it’s an open secret that even Charles makes scornful reference to), but part of the drama of how it’s portrayed is that it’s not just an “eating disorder.” It’s Diana’s way of rejecting the food porn that’s part of what the royals use to numb themselves.
As “Spencer” presents it, Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick of a man who openly betrays her. Not an uncommon situation. But since she’s one of the royals, she cannot leave him (or so she thinks). She’s effectively imprisoned. She knows she’s supposed to wear the gorgeous pearl necklace that Charles got her, but he also got the same necklace for her — for his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who we glimpse outside the church on Christmas morning; she gives Diana a grin of malice). He did it thoughtlessly, not even realizing that anyone would notice. (Unlike Diana, he’s got a pre-media mind.) In her bedroom at the mansion, Diana finds a biography of Anne Boleyn, the wife that Henry VIII accused of adultery and beheaded so that he could marry someone else, and she begins to feel Boleyn as a kindred spirit. Larraín stages a remarkable dinner scene in which Diana takes in the stares of Charles, the Queen, and others who have begun to register that she’s “cracking up.” Their attitude is: How do you solve a problem like Diana? But Diana grabs the pearls around her neck as if the necklace itself were about to execute her. Those pearls are killing her softly.
How will Diana escape? For most of the movie, she has no idea that she can. But an encounter with a scarecrow, nicknamed Bertie, that she remembers from her youth, when she was Diana Spencer, sets off something in her. She goes to visit her old house, which is all boarded up, and she realizes that she was more of herself back then than she is now. That said, in all the conflicts she has with Charles, who is played by Jack Farthing as a man of brutal limitation, there’s one that she’s driven not to compromise on: She does not want her sons to become part of their father’s pheasant-hunting brigade. She says it’s dangerous. She’s right, but the real problem is what she won’t say: that she feels like she’s one of the pheasants, and that the habit of hunting , and the way that it’s linked to the royals’ tradition of “military” discipline (though a real soldier doesn’t get his prey paraded right in front of him), incarnates everything that’s wrong with them.
So the day after Christmas, she drives out to the hunting ground, desperate and defiant, and she becomes that scarecrow. Skewing her arms up in the air, Diana demands that her sons stop hunting. And Stewart makes that the most moving moment I’ve seen in any film this year. Diana isn’t speaking as a royal. She’s speaking as a mother — as the woman she will now be. How will she do it? As the pop song that plays thrillingly during the following sequence tells us, all she needs is a miracle (and maybe a little fast food). She will still be “Diana.” But now she will be herself.
Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 111 MIN.
- Production: A NEON/Topic Studios release of a Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films production, in association with FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wigand.
- Crew: Director: Pablo Larraín. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Camera: Claire Mathin. Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda. Music: Jonny Greenwood.
- With: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson.
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In 'Spencer,' Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana grasps for reality in order to survive
Linda Holmes
Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life. Pablo Larraín/Neon hide caption
Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life.
Pablo Larraín's Spencer opens with a label that reads, "A fable from a true tragedy." The tragedy, of course, is the story of Diana Spencer, who became Princess of Wales, went through a bitter and public divorce, was largely beloved nevertheless, and lived a short life — at 36, she was literally chased to her death. The fable, on the other hand, is an imagining of a Christmas weekend in the early '90s when her children were young, when a separated but not yet divorced Diana realizes the depth of her own despair and decides to pursue her freedom.
It seems only fair that a woman like Diana, so eagerly drawn by pop culture and so damaged by the ravenous interest in her, would get a chance to be seen through different cinematic lenses. The stage musical about her life that recently debuted on Netflix fails in part because it feels devoid of ideas and perspective, like a filmed Wikipedia page that runs down a checklist of events in her life. Spencer , instead, makes the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of its audience already knows how Diana fit into the family, how she was publicly perceived, how she died, how she was treated. Details are not fussed over or explained: Camilla Parker-Bowles looms large over this story but is not named, because Larraín and Knight assume you know her, you know at least the vague outlines of her history with Charles, and you know how things turned out.
Picture This
A father's day gift from meghan to harry is now a kids' book.
The most obvious precursor to Spencer is Larraín's Jackie , which also studied a few crucial days in the life of one of the world's most famous women: in that case, young Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of the death of her husband. But while the films share a fondness for footage of women who feel and look lost in enormous, grand spaces, Spencer -- written by Steven Knight — is far less bounded by efforts to be faithful to, or even recreate, reality. Even if Jackie faithfully recreates reality mostly in order to imbue it with unexpected elements of horror or irony (as when Kennedy wanders around hearing "Camelot"), it is careful to make Natalie Portman sound precisely like Kennedy and to have its footage of the White House Christmas tour look precisely as it actually did. It also adopts quite a conventional structure and framing device in the form of a journalist coming to interview Kennedy about these events later.
Spencer is, from that opening title, much more unconventional and almost entirely uninterested in the historical accuracy of any of its details; it is intentionally not real, intentionally a "fable." Other than the roughest outlines of Diana's marriage and the cast of royals who surround her, there's little reason to believe this story is literally true; it is instead meant to feel true, to say something true, and to change the angle through which Diana is seen, from a storybook princess to something closer to a Gothic horror heroine struggling to hang on to her grip on reality as her world tilts. And rather than the interview conceit that Jackie is built around, Spencer opens with a long, beautifully shot, and initially baffling sequence that communicates just how disconnected from a regular person's reality Diana's Christmas weekend is actually going to be.
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Reality begins to tilt.
We meet Diana, played beautifully by Kristen Stewart, as she drives herself to the Sandringham estate where the royal festivities happen every year. She gets lost and is therefore late, and arriving after the Queen means that she begins the weekend already having erred, already being — as she sees it — in trouble. Confronted with scales on which she must be weighed at the beginning and end of the weekend, offered a series of pre-selected outfits she's meant to wear for everything from meals to church trips, Diana feels not merely micromanaged and limited, but instantly choked by her surroundings, even as she finds refuge in the company of her children.
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But what begins as a straightforward drama begins to tilt as Diana struggles with an eating disorder, a habit of self-harm, and paranoia that the film plays with. Initially this paranoia seems unreasonable, but eventually it seems like it might just be common sense. One of the men who works for the Queen, played by Timothy Spall, is a terrifyingly cold figure who seems to be everywhere at once, and who could have walked directly out of a horror novel that will eventually reveal that he maintains a torture room.
The dread around the story only grows, especially when Diana finds that someone has left a book about Anne Boleyn in her room. She sees parallels between herself and another royal wife who fell out of favor, and clings to her only friend, a dresser named Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins. Maggie's presence and absence affect Diana's sense of safety, both physically and emotionally.
Seeing a different Princess
Diana has so often been seen in popular culture as either a perfect princess or a tragic victim; here, she is a woman trying to be proactive in her own survival, much like the "final girl" in any horror film must be. And while the other royals do speak — there is one fascinating scene between Charles and Diana that beautifully positions them as strategic opponents — they don't do so very often. They mostly hover, they move in and out of frame, and they are often out of focus and effectively anonymous on an individual level. Their personhood isn't terribly relevant to Diana by this point in her life; they exist as monsters, or at least as threats. They play the role of ghosts or whistling winds here, more than as characters with whom she interacts.
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It's not even just Gothic horror that Larraín seems to be referencing, though; echoes shift throughout. There is — and honestly, there also was in Jackie — a bit of The Shining , here in the way Diana seems at times to be lost in the long corridors of the house, seeing things that might not actually be there, feeling that her mere presence is sapping her of sanity. There's some of the stiffness of upstairs-downstairs royal tales. There's even a bit of the '70s paranoid thriller and the '90s trenchcoat thriller: Spall is part horror, yes, but he's also part ominous company man, like the one who lingers at the edges of most John Grisham books, making grave pronouncements about what might happen to those who go against power. A scene in which he warns Diana while out on the grounds of the estate looks a lot like scenes in which FBI agents or mysterious operatives walk around the National Mall with their collars pulled up, telling people not to talk.
The design does great work here — the grand halls, the spooky beauty, the dated outfits and familiar dresses — as does the score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood is a prolific film composer, and has a particularly deft touch with what might be called the grandly unsettling: The Master, There Will Be Blood , and particularly Phantom Thread , for which he earned an Oscar nomination. The score is sometimes traditionally orchestral, sometimes discordant and creepy, and smart about touches like jazz-inflected horns that instantly shift the mood.
Kristen Stewart's Diana
While her take on Diana's voice rang true enough to my American ear, Stewart wisely doesn't spend a lot of time physically recreating Diana with precision — with one exception. Early on, when Diana is lost, she stops at a small café to ask for directions. As she walks through the crowd, which recognizes her and stares in silent awe, Stewart briefly casts her eyes down at the floor and smiles just a bit. That moment is so very reminiscent of the real Diana that it creates a bond between actor and real person that survives even the most reality-bending moments in the story.
Her performance here is powerful, and it carries this version of Diana through such instability as a character (is she right to be afraid? is she losing her grip on reality?), but she always seems like the same person, the same good mother who doesn't know how to begin to separate herself from the life she's walked into. She is asked to do big things, grand things, genre horror things, but she never tips over into caricature.
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The obvious question about any Diana project at this point is whether it has anything to add to the massive amount of cultural material about her that already exists. By the end of her life, she had told her own story in her own words quite a bit. But the point of Spencer seems to be not to reveal Diana the real person, but to treat her differently in a cinematic sense — to recast her in a different kind of movie than the ones that we've already seen. And, perhaps ironically, to use horror to imagine an ending for her that's less horrifying.
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Spencer First Reviews: Kristen Stewart is “Mesmerizing” in Princess Diana Biopic That’s More Shining than The Crown
Critics out of the venice film festival say pablo larraín’s latest is a poetic, eerie “masterpiece” – or a potential camp classic, perhaps – that makes a perfect companion piece to his jackie ..
TAGGED AS: Awards , Awards Tour , Drama , festivals , movies , venice
(Photo by NEON)
One of the most intriguing biopics in years, Spencer stars American actress Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, a world-famous figure who has already been portrayed many times before (including recently in the acclaimed fourth season of The Crown ). This time, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is at the helm and the first reviews out of the Venice Film Festival are praising Spencer as a fitting companion to his Jackie Kennedy film starring Natalie Portman, Jackie . Could this be another major Oscar contender? That’s a good possibility. But this is also another artsy portrait that may not hold a broad enough appeal to enthrall all fans of Stewart, Diana, or stories involving the British throne in general.
Here’s what critics are saying about Spencer :
How is Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of Diana?
“I can’t say enough about Stewart’s performance…it is a bracing, bitter, moving, and altogether stunning turn, taking Diana down roads we have not seen played out quite like in this mesmerizing portrayal.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“This is no impression — it’s more an interpretation of a classic role, bringing layers of real human complexity.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian
“Casting Stewart, another reserved celebrity who knows the obsessive, overbearing glare of fandom better than most, is inspired… it’s a wry, empathetic evocation of a woman somehow locked out of both her inner and outer lives, frozen in the corridor.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week
“Her most riveting performance since Personal Shopper .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Are there any standouts in the supporting roles?
“Sally Hawkins is very fine and hits just the right notes in [her] role…[Jack] Farthing manages to nail the tightly controlled Charles, but does show flashes of a human being eventually.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“Hawkins brings great warmth as Maggie, Diana’s sole ally in this twitchily mistrustful place.” – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)
How does the movie compare to Jackie ?
“Like Larraín’s earlier film Jackie , in which Natalie Portman starred as JFK’s grieving wife, this is a self-consciously poetic and elegiac affair.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)
“Spencer is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s Jackie …every bit as good; it may be even better.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“As in Larraín’s equally brilliant, surprising Jackie , to which Spencer is an intricately attuned companion piece, the director thrills in presenting a public icon freed of her public, unsure how to act around herself.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week
“ Spencer is something else indeed…a more accessible approach in some ways, but also more ambitious.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“Unlike the maelstrom of emotions in Larain’s previous, and similarly-calibrated celebrity portrait pic, Jackie , this one is slower, linear and more austere, better to fit the genteel and regimented-to-death context of a Yuletide with Her Majesty.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Is Spencer better than past Princess Diana biopics?
“A considerable upgrade on the ill-fated 2014 biopic in which Naomi Watts played Diana.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)
“Far from the laughable disaster of Oliver Hirshbiegel’s 2013 Diana starring Naomi Watts, Larrain’s Spencer will cause a sensation…it’s certainly a royal biopic like no other.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“We have seen many takes on Diana…but Larrain has something very different, very intimate, and very revealing in mind here.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
Will it please fans of The Crown ?
“This is a long way from the more decorous treatment of Netflix’s The Crown .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“This isn’t The Crown, it is far more insular, an intimate portrait of a woman trying to save herself.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“A more daring alternative to Netflix’s popular show The Crown , Spencer tries, and largely succeeds, to get under Diana’s skin.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post
“Larrain, working from Steven Knight’s script, is clearly going for something more classical here than can be found in an episode of the giant Netflix series The Crown .” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“ Spencer , the eerie, witty and quite extraordinary film that has resulted from their persistence, isn’t necessarily for fans of The Crown , or fetishists of royal ritual and ceremony.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week
“Unlike The Crown, there is no risk whatsoever of Pablo Larraín’s resplendently mad, sad and beautiful Spencer …being mistaken for historical fact.” – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph (UK)
Is there a particular classic film it will remind us of?
“Larrain’s overhead shot of Diana’s approach turns Sandringham into a haunted house, or the Overlook Hotel from The Shining , rather than a royal residence.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“Larraín makes the place look as spooky as Kubrick’s hotel in The Shining .” – Xan Brooks, Guardian
“Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of The Shining .” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Not for nothing do the long, depopulated hallways of Sandringham occasionally call the Overlook Hotel to mind.” – Guy Lodge, Film of the Week
“The film recalls both Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette , in its elegantly decked-out dissection of cloistered entitlement, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining .” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
How is the screenplay?
“The script, by Steven Knight, creates its own alluring cleverness. It’s there in Diana’s dialogue, which consists of her spewing out observations, to others but almost to herself, with a kind of rueful mockery.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“The dialogue is rather on-the-nose, and practically every sentence feels aware of itself as a pronouncement of era-defining depth and acuity.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“Occasionally Knight’s dialogue is on the nose…but Stewart sells even those awkward missteps.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“The script by Steven Knight is problematic from the get-go, packed with lots of winking pop psychology and on-the-nose portent, and clearly written with future tragedy in mind.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Is it funny?
“There’s even time for a little humor, from a line about masturbation to an airing of a classic Mike and the Mechanics track.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post
“There are some scenes that risk teetering into unintentional comedy…it could well grow into a gothic, almost camp classic.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“Veers wildly from moments of dreamy intrigue to risible scenes of camp.” – Kevin Maher, Times (UK)
How does the movie look?
“Mathon’s camerawork is ravishing, constantly in motion, gliding behind and circling a subject who bristles at being under constant surveillance.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are particularly exquisite.” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post
How is the score?
“Composer Jonny Greenwood [twists] the traditional sounds of heraldry into something creepy and unsettling.” – Jason Solomons, The Wrap
“The music by Jonny Greenwood is as bracing and risky as anything else in Larraín’s film, shifting from melodic piano and string themes early on into discordant free-form jazz or oppressive pipe organ passages as Diana’s self-possession unravels.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Jonny Greenwood’s brilliant but sometimes heavy-handed score which deftly combines prim, dinnertime minuettes with clanging atonal dirges.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
“Absolutely-should-be-Oscar-winning.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist
Does the Royal Family come off looking badly?
“Larraín largely holds back on characterizing the other royals…” – James Mottram, South China Morning Post
“There is no question the film firmly lands on the side of Diana… [it’s] a humorless, stiff, and dreary picture of Royal life that seems about as life less as possible.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“While some will no doubt reject Spencer as lurid psychodrama, the presentation of the royal family as a sinister body corporate, ready to inflict wounds and ice out any interloper who tarnishes their brand is chillingly compelling.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“It is an understatement to say that many living royals – including the current regent – do not come off well in this film.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
“No doubt it took an outsider to make a film that’s as un-reverential as Spencer , which dares to examine the royals as if they were specimens under glass.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian
“All the right people are going to hate Spencer . That’s just how good it is.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist
Will anyone have an issue with its historical or physical accuracy?
“This is a film in which the essence of the characters is given more weight than the actors’ resemblance to them.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“The film is bound to infuriate traditionalists. Larraín and Knight have taken huge liberties with their subject matter.” – Geoffrey Macnab, Independent (UK)
“Entirely to its credit, Spencer is nothing like real history, and its Diana can certainly not be proven to be anything like the real Diana, whoever that poor woman was.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist
What one or two words are best to describe the movie?
“Masterpiece.” – Jessica Kiang, The Playlist
“Magnificent.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Extraordinary.” – Xan Brooks, Guardian
“Audaciously original.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
“Brilliantly imagined.” – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“Infuriating.” – Kevin Maher, Times (UK)
“Sad and hopeless.” – David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Spencer is in theaters from Friday November 5, 2021.
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