Pablo Larraín (2021)

A dissatisfying screen adaptation of a novel or play, or of a fascinating real-life story, can be doubly regrettable – a missed opportunity that also, in effect, puts a lengthy moratorium on trying to do a better job.  Thirty years after the film Scandal (1989), the television serial The Trial of Christine Keeler was excellent in several ways but hardly made up for lost time.  Those who can’t get enough of Diana, Princess of Wales have no such worries:  she’s the dramatisable gift that keeps on giving.  In Spencer, showing at the London Film Festival just ahead of its general release in cinemas, Diana is played by Kristen Stewart.  According to Wikipedia, Stewart’s screen predecessors in the role (since Diana’s death in 1997) have included:

‘… Amy Seccombe (in Diana: A Tribute to the People’s Princess, 1998), Michelle Duncan (in Whatever Love Means, 2005), Genevieve O’Reilly (in Diana: Last Days of a Princess, 2007), Nathalie Brocker (in The Murder of Princess Diana, 2007), Naomi Watts (in Diana, 2013), Emma Corrin … (in The Crown, 2020) …’

That’s not to mention Jeanna de Waal in the (reputedly unmentionable) stage show Diana, The Musical, streamed recently on Netflix ahead of its Broadway opening.  Elizabeth Debicki takes over from Emma Corrin in next year’s next series of The Crown.   

Pablo Larraín and Steven Knight, who wrote the screenplay for Spencer, may well shudder to see their entry in the Diana stakes compared, even remotely, with any of the above.  They mean to release their heroine from the prison of posh soap melodrama into the realm of arthouse.  An introductory caption announces that their film isn’t based on, or even inspired by, a true story; it’s ‘a fable from a true tragedy’.  The film-makers partly succeed in their aim – there are a few surreal details, the narrative is sometimes boring, the finale is a flight of fancy.  But this pretentious exercise is ultimately a futile one.  Spencer distinguishes itself from a camp, trashy treatment of the subject chiefly through being up itself.  It still amounts to no more than extra-posh soap melodrama.

The time is December 1991, the year before the announcement of Charles and Diana’s separation.  The action covers three consecutive days, beginning on Christmas Eve.  The setting is the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, where the royal family traditionally spends Christmas.  Diana is making her own way there, in a Porsche, without a security detail, and arrives late, to her in-laws’ irritation.  Although the Firm functions, of course, as Diana’s bête noire,  few of its members have large roles in what follows.  Apart from the Queen (Stella Gonet), Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), and William and Harry (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry), the Windsors’ distance from the camera is such as to render them virtually faceless (though I did spot Elizabeth Berrington as Princess Anne).  The most significant other royal on the premises is a dead one – Anne Boleyn, whom Spencer regards as Diana’s spiritual predecessor, a beauteous young consort who paid the ultimate price for feistiness.  (She’s certainly a kindred spirit in the sense of making too many screen appearances; at the rate things are going, though, she’ll soon be left standing by the queen of people’s hearts.)  Diana is strangely drawn to a book in the Sandringham library about Anne, whose ghost (Amy Manson) pays her a couple of visits to offer cautionary advice.

A trio of servants enjoys more screen time than any of the adult royals.  The ophidian Major Gregory (Timothy Spall), an equerry from Clarence House supposedly responsible for supervising Sandringham security, spends most of his time struggling to immure Diana.  Maggie (Sally Hawkins) is her dresser and confidante – until the suspicious Gregory sends Maggie back to London on Christmas Day.  Come Boxing Day, Maggie returns to Sandringham:  she has to, for a significant eleventh-hour conversation with her mistress.  Whereas Gregory and Maggie, though they may be based on actual people, are fictional, Darren McGrady (Sean Harris), in charge of the army of kitchen staff, really was a royal chef.  He, too, gets on well with Diana.  Their first scene together happens when she gets lost on the approach to Sandringham, and comes upon Darren and another bloke standing at the side of the road.  I didn’t understand why they were there – except, as with Maggie’s going-and-coming, for Pablo Larraín’s convenience.

Larraín’s films based in his native Chile have been of variable quality but consistently serious-minded.  When he’s dealing with tragic beauties of public life in the English-speaking world, he seems to go weak at the knees, and in the head.  Jackie (2016)’s conception of its title character wasn’t convincing or dramatically interesting but at least the uncompromising, sometimes harsh leading lady made for a rather novel take on Jacqueline Kennedy’s vulnerable nobility.  Spencer is a different matter.  Larraín buys completely into the popular view that Diana, at the time of her engagement to Charles, aspired simply to be his loving wife; then, seeing there was no future in that, wanted only to be a dedicated and adoring mother.  (The Crown pushes a more plausible line on the lead-up to the marriage.  Keen on becoming a princess and a queen, Diana makes a naïve but determined play for Charles before realising, soon but still too late, what a horrific mistake she has made.)

This film’s Diana is uncooperative and continues to protest against William’s induction into pheasant shooting on Boxing Day.  She makes the occasional ‘outrageous’ remark, telling the replacement dresser (Laura Benson), ‘Please leave now – I wish to masturbate’.  For the most part, though, she’s the suffering, isolated victim par excellence – alone and palely loitering, to put it mildly.  What Kristen Stewart does, requires talent (as well as beauty) yet it comes across as a spoof performance.  Her practised mimicry of Diana’s head and eye movements, her nailing of that leave-me-alone-but-look-at-me countenance, the intense, clipped whisper in which she mostly speaks – these may well earn Stewart an Oscar but I found their effect comical.  She’s much better – freer – in her scenes with William and Harry, especially when they play a game together early on Christmas morning, and in the last exchange with Maggie, who confesses to being in love with her.  Diana’s shocked laughter is welcome – not only because laughter in (as distinct from at) Spencer is in short supply but also because this is a rare moment when Stewart seems spontaneous.  As the young princes, Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry are earnestly, touchingly excellent.  As usual (and not for the first time against the odds), Sally Hawkins manages to find some truth in the character she’s playing.  Jack Farthing does his job of portraying Charles as a nasty wimp.

It’ll be interesting to see how Spencer fares at the box office.  Although its anti-monarchy credentials may limit its appeal, there’s a sizeable constituency of royalists that seems to go for anything regal.  Larraín presents what goes on at Sandringham as pathological:  soldiers doing a security check before the massed ranks of household staff move in; the bonkers-verging-on-obscene grandeur and abundance of food and drink; the shooting party with their gun dogs.  But plenty of the pomp-and-circumstance brigade will no doubt buy a ticket for the film, just as they did for Downton Abbey.  Then there are the clothes.  Jacqueline Durran may well win an Oscar, too (another one) – although you have to wonder if costume design is really the appropriate term here.  This protagonist’s wardrobe is exceptionally well known and not a few of its contents are in evidence (including that fatefully creased wedding dress).  This is more costume reconstruction.

Viewers already sick of watching Diana being sick are advised to steer clear of Spencer, particularly if they’re liable to worry about the frocks getting soiled by the bulimia.  When her pearl necklace, a gift from Charles, breaks during dinner, the pearls plop into Diana’s bowl of balefully thick green soup (or so she imagines).  She retrieves and swallows the pearls, and later throws up the soup.  Fantasy decorations like this tend to detract from things that seem like bizarre inventions but are actually true – notably the requirement for each Sandringham guest, on arrival and eventual departure, to sit on an antique weighing machine.  This procedure, amusingly sinister in the film, was introduced by Prince Albert as a light-hearted means of verifying, through increased poundage, that everyone had enjoyed their Christmas sufficiently.  I also liked the bit when, after the family has settled down around the television together to watch the Queen’s Christmas speech, the monarch leaves the room halfway through to walk the corgis.  Jonny Greenwood’s music, unlike his score for The Power of the Dog, is impressively varied – ceremonial, elegiac, suggesting emotional disturbance.  As with Mica Levi’s comparably complex score for Jackie, though, the music tends to upstage the visual drama.

That ‘fable’ label signals Larraín and Knight’s self-given freedom to make things up but Spencer cheats even within its own invented set-up.  When she stops for directions close to Sandringham, Diana explains that ‘I’ve absolutely no idea where I am’ (this to make clear her sense of égarement within the royal family).  Never mind that she spent the first fourteen years of her life on the Sandringham estate (her father moved the family to Althorp in 1975); the close proximity of Park House, her birthplace and childhood home, to the royal residence and Diana’s familiarity with the area, will bulk large in the tale that Larraín proceeds to tell.  Diana seems to recognise the same old scarecrow in the fields and starts visiting Park House under cover of darkness.  It’s boarded up but still complete with evocative doll’s house and rocking-horse, though at least there’s no music box on which to play a nostalgic melody.  (For the record, the property in 1991 was operating as a hotel for the disabled, the Queen having given Park House to Leonard Cheshire’s disability charity several years previously.)

Why the surname title?  I’d assumed it was because the forename had already been taken (by Oliver Hirschbiegel’s reasonably derided 2013 biopic), especially when there was no reason to suppose Larraín’s film would be peopled by Diana’s blood relations rather than members of the family she married into.  And so it proves – Spencer, despite a few flashbacks and the childhood paraphernalia, isn’t much about her beginnings.  The climactic pheasant shoot sees her march into the line of fire, risking her life in order to rescue her children from the barbarously anachronistic world to which their lineage would otherwise consign them.  The scene is staged to suggest the conclusive vanquishment of monarchy.  Diana, with William and Harry, escapes from Sandringham and they drive back to London, ‘All I Need is a Miracle’ by Mike and the Mechanics playing on the Porsche radio.  Larraín’s title is explained in the very last scene.  Mother and sons stop at a drive-through KFC by Tower Bridge.  They place their order and the voice on the intercom asks what name.  Diana’s reply confirms who-she-really-is.  ‘Spencer’ is – has – the film’s last word.

17 October 2021