It should have been a match made in heaven: Paolo Larrain, fresh off of making Ema, one of the year’s best films, and also revisiting the ground that built his bona fides with American audiences — depictions of “royalty” under emotional siege, full of glamor and ennui in equal measure — joined up with Steven Wright, one of the more iconoclastic writers working in modern Hollywood, to make a movie about Princess Diana at a pivotal point in her life, with the trinity completed by the presence of Kristen Stewart as the ethereal yet all-too-human princess. Yet, instead of finding itself with Beatrice up in the Clouds, the final product, the uneven if beautiful Spencer lands in the Purgatorio, trapped with other ambitious works of imagination and aesthetic which never figured out the right recipe to make them transcendent. It’s not a total failure by any means, but it’s more like when a starting pitcher alternates giving up home runs and base hits to folks hitting .180 with heaters that just split the plate and cause big-time hitters to eat shit in the dirt. That is to say that even if Spencer ultimately succeeds in some areas, there’s just too much bullshit to walk away from it thinking that it was a good win.
Devoid of the framing device that gave Jackie its backbone (and its further emotional depth), Spencer documents an important Christmas in the life of the then-Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart), who, despite the ongoing turmoil in her family life, is compelled to attend a royal family gathering at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. This location is important to her, given that the Estate is right near the large house that Diana grew up in, though it’s been recently condemned and shuttered and its memories haunt the plowed fields in a few forms, such as a scarecrow she and her friends made as a child, still draped in her father’s worn coat. When we first encounter her, Diana’s lost, drifting around the backroads and byways without a security team or anybody knowing where the hell she is, a fitting parallel to her mental state at the time. It has just been revealed in the tabloids that her husband, Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), has been having an affair with an old relation, whom he seems to love more than her, and Diana is, understandably, struggling with this knowledge. So, Spencer aims to provide a glimpse into her mental state at the time, and perhaps offer a plausible explanation for her actions in the following months, when she would leave the Prince and begin her life as a Lady.
As usual, Stewart is delightful, giving a beautiful and deep performance that somehow manages to both be a pitch-perfect impression of the stately People’s Princess while also emphasizing her bitter response to both her husband’s infidelities and the arctic chill of royal manner and tradition. She displays Diana’s quick wit and chafed angst in equal measure, bringing a grounded complexity to a figure who is often rendered in broad strokes at specific points in her life: her wedding, her death. She’s surrounded by a fabulous cast, including Sally Hawkins as her loyal dresser and confidant, Sean Harris as the genial head chef of the Royal Kitchen, and, importantly, Timothy Spall as the butler brought in to supervise the Christmas festivities, who has a chilly and stately manner learned from his years in the military. All deliver strong performances, and even when Larrain or Wright fails them, they’re able to pick up the pieces with aplomb, such as Stewart’s managing of one of the writer’s goofy devices, when a ghostly figure from history visits Diana in a haunted house menagerie cooked up in perhaps the same fog that Serenity was conceived in. It’s the kind of thing that would be considered “imaginative” in other tellings of the same story, but given the already massive amounts of fabulist thinking inherently present in such an invention, it’s a miracle that Stewart is able to make the scene work.
Then again, when a film this short is this strangely shaggy, one starts looking for places to blame, and I think a lot of Spencer‘s issues can be laid at the feet of the writer. Wright’s best work is often defined by the quality of a few individual brilliant scenes, stitched together with by a throughline plot that enhances them and allows them to resonate appropriately. One only needs to look back at Locke, his best screenplay, which is nothing but scenes and conversations which reflect his ability to capture conversational rhythms in compelling dialogue. There are wonderous scenes here, such as a Christmas eve game between Diana and her two sons, where they trade secrets with one person pretending to be an army major and the other a soldier who is being compelled by a superior to be honest, or the few moments where Stewart and Spall truly get to spar, including a great moment in a courtyard, where Spall relates a story of his service in Ireland during the Troubles and the Princess reacts to his confession with a bracing flippancy that is, perhaps, the best illustration of her willingness to Kick Against The Pricks of royal tradition (it’s also amusing how much Wright’s script nods in the general direction of the conspiracy theories behind Diana’s death, though they’re often buried in enough layers of plausible deniability that, without prior knowledge, one could totally ignore). The problem is the rest of the film, where it feels like the guiding narrative hand that should be supplied by a writer is taken off of the clutch, and Larrain scrambles to pick up the pieces and, as such, he plugs the gaps in his reassemblage with thin paper-mache-like imagery.
This is to say that Spencer is, as expected, a gorgeously shot film, with rich textures and colors, enhanced by beautiful costume design and frequently well-blocked staging/framing. Moments like the one photographed on the poster — Diana, clad in that lovely jewel-studded white dress — are often undercut with real physical pain, such as when it’s revealed that she’s taken that pose while purging herself of her dinner after a difficult situation with her family at the table. Or, perhaps, when Diana imagines herself ripping her pearls off and letting the white beads fall into a light-green pea soup, which she then eats, crunching down on the cruelness of her husband’s callous gift of identical pairs to her and Parker-Bowles. This approach is the smartest metaphor that the film deploys, and it’s as achingly painful as it is gorgeous at the moment, but as the distance from the “real” grows, the film starts to stall out. Larrain descends into pure fantasy near one of its three-or-four endings, and it’s an unwise concession to aestheticism that simply cannot make up for recognizable substance, where it begins to resemble a perfume commercial, or perhaps that one ad with Bruce Lee’s digitally-reanimated corpse shilling whiskey. Undoubtedly, it is beautiful and “respectful,” and likely to please audiences well-steeped in royal history or at least Stephen Frears’ interpretation of it, but it feels lighter than air, unable to define the “true tragedy” that this “fable” wants to find, as the film’s pre-credit title card defines it.
This is the key thing that separates Spencer from Jackie: the latter film maintained a consistent tone (assisted by that gorgeous Mica Levi score, whose contributions this film dearly misses, as Jonny Greenwood’s jazzy numbers don’t mesh with the mood) and, to be perfectly honest, it both had a well-executed point and didn’t shy away from the matters of the moment. It’s bizarre that Larrain was willing to show JFK’s exposed brain, clutched in the arms of the blood-drenched first lady, while only making patient and careful rhetorical allusions to what was going on in Diana’s life during this pivotal moment. Some might find the maudlin-free closeness (and, ultimately, the film’s peaceful ending, which reminds me somewhat of how The End of the Tour depicted David Foster Wallace through his love of fast food) to be appropriate, a celebration of a powerful woman seeking to free herself from the shackles of her oppression and make a difference, be it through charity work or through raising her sons not to be pheasant-hunting goons like the rich slobs they spend Christmastime with. Yet, this elides the most important aspect of Jackie, which one might imagine might be a little more important given their shared focus on the struggles of image-oriented famous women: The concern about how they are seen and their cognizance that one day their moment may pass. Diana, perhaps, doesn’t want to think about it as she plunges into a world of her own, but one could imagine how she might see herself in the world, as glimpsed by the paparazzi that are often referred to and rarely seen, but there’s nothing as genuinely shattering here as the scene in which, having just left the White House, Mrs. Kennedy watches mannequins being traded out from a department store’s displays and silently reflects, as if she’s thinking sic transit gloria mundi. Then again, Diana never got to see her glory fade.