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.
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I enjoyed this historic novel but didn’t find it quite as enthralling as Wolf Hall. Possibly this is down to the fact that I knew more what to expect but also could be because Thomas Cromwell seems less Machiavellian this time around. I missed the fact that he had no intellectual equal to play off against. Thomas More fulfilled this role in Wolf Hall but, by the time the sequel starts, More has gone the way of many others by being executed.
