'Spencer' is required viewing for anyone with a princess fantasy (and everyone else too)
Neon
I don’t know if the Princess of Wales has ever been referred to as P.O.W., but when the acronym appears attached to a variety of prepared outfits in “Spencer,” the meaning is obvious: Diana (Kristen Stewart) is a princess, yes, but she is a prisoner of war as well. This powerful woman is in fact nearly powerless in her confinement within the proper, unflinching rules and traditions of the family she married into, and escape at this point seems a severely unlikely option.
If “Spencer” were a particular type of movie, you might expect Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” to appear over the end titles. It doesn’t (though at one point Diana does use wire cutters to separate curtains that have been fixed shut, allegedly to keep out nosy photographers but more likely to prevent her from unmonitored exposure to the outside world); rather, the score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (“There Will Be Blood,” “The Master”) includes a lot of anxious, unraveling strings and lively, restless jazz, trumpets at one point sounding like a scream. The timeliness of this movie, titled after Diana’s maiden name, can’t be ignored; “Spencer” is a devastating portrait of the way things have always been done clashing with the urgency of reality, of a person against a system.
You won’t find someone who cares less about the royal family than I do, and I was riveted the entire time.
Part of that is because Stewart, beyond fantastic here, is such a perfect choice, playing a version of a real person who, like her, was labeled defiant for feeling uncomfortable about the narrow, judgmental expectations placed on her by a machine of history, media, and publicity. Yes, Stewart’s accent is remarkable; it had to be. But she inhabits this Diana, who is immensely lonely (she longs for more time with her preferred Royal Dresser, played by Sally Hawkins) and always looking for a moment that feels like her own, with an independence informed by Stewart’s own persona but never owing to it. It’s a performance both entirely clear and never simplistic.
Of course, when director Pablo Larrain (whose over-praised “Jackie” lacked the strong point of view of “Spencer”) and writer Steven Knight (whose career ranges from the great “Eastern Promises” to the good “Locke” to the dreadful “Burnt” and “Serenity”) open the film with words labeling it as a fable based on a true tragedy, the assumption (at least for me) is that this is a reference to Diana’s death. As the princess spends the 1991 holiday season at an estate near her former home and struggles to tolerate being managed and repressed in a house where everyone seems to hear everything, the tragedy is her life, and her tremendous spirit being subjected to a world that, as she says, resists the future and merges past and present into one.
That isn’t to say that “Spencer” believes there is no greater sadness than being rich and wanting for nothing. With a focus that critics might call a tad redundant and pro-monarchy folks might call a little one-sided (insert rant about the damaging propaganda of Disney princess movies), it simply argues against the necessity of subjugation, as seen through the psychological deterioration of a person treated as a commodity. Princess, actress, famous, whatever. Sometimes you just need someone to talk to and to make your own damn schedule -- and it shouldn't be wrong to wonder why a big house refuses to let any light in.
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