SPENCER directed by Pablo Larraín (UK/USA/Germany/Chile, 2021)
With ‘Diana – The Musical’ winning this year’s Razzie for the worst movie of the year, I approached a viewing of a biopic of Diana Spencer with a certain degree of trepidation. Fortunately, this fine movie presents a more nuanced and challenging portrait of the ill-fated princess.
It’s a tough project to take on because, since her passing, Lady Di’s image has become almost uncorruptable. Being dead gives her a unique advantage. The fatal car crash in Paris means she is forever young; an English rose that never wilts. As Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra : “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale”. The same most certainly cannot be said of Camilla – the current Queen in waiting. At 74, she is reasonably well preserved by can’t hope to hold a candle (in the wind) to the permanently glowing image of Diana who at 36 was more than half her age when she died in 1997.
I was curious to see if Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín would dare to challenge the myth that has built up around the so-called ‘people’s princess’. His brilliant reappraisal in 2016 of Jackie Kennedy (Jackie) showed that Larraín was prepared to take an unconventional approach to storytelling and present an outsider’s pov. With ‘Spencer’ he shows that this was no one-off.
Using the surname only for the title provides a certain edginess. To call it ‘Diana’ would suggest a doting regard and a kid’s glove approach to the subject matter. I wasn’t looking for a heartwarming experience and hoped that some element of realism would be allowed to creep into the tale. Fortunately, this is precisely what we get.
‘Spencer’ cleverly opens with the disclaimer that what we are about to see is “a fable based on a true tragedy.” In this way there is no need to justify falsication of events as the makers of Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ have been urged to do.
Screenwriter Steven ‘Peaky Blinders’ Knight doesn’t need to bother about factual accuracy. This gives him carte blanche to explore the psyche of a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The result is a bold character study that requires Kristen Stewart to carry the whole movie. She does this imopressively. Her opening line is “Where the fuck am I?” and she is both literally and metaphorically lost throughout.
As she slowly cracks up, she gets little or no support or sympathy from the establishment she is trapped inside. The buttoned-up regal rituals and outdated traditions are presented as repressive and stuck in the past. Interactions with Charles and the Queen are minimal but leave no doubt that Diana’s public role has a symbolic value that overrides any personal traumas. Most of the time we see her trying (and mostly failing) to keep body and soul together trailed by the ghost of Anne Boleyn.
This film does not present the monarchy in a positive light and as far as I am concerned anything that helps towards the instutution’s demise is to be welcomed. As Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign draws to an inevitable close, I’d be delighted to see the anachronistic institution die with her.
The recent sickening images of Prince William and wife Kate patronising the citizens of the Caribbean like colonial masters add weight to the argument that the the royals have no place in the 21st century. It is heartening that William – second in line to the throne when Charles eventually croaks – was prepared to broach the possibility that the monarchy might be replaced by a republic. Will’s brother Harry and Meghan Markle’s have already escaped with their carefully media-orchestrated ‘Megzit’.
As tourists are money, a case could be made for opening up all the castles and mansions to the public. The dead symbolism could be kept alive for visitors to the sceptred (and increasingly septic) British Isles in the form of waxwork figures of the heroes and villians. If this happens, Diana will not have died in vain.
