Heading into TIFF Lightbox last week for the first time in what felt like a century, I was excited to see Spencer, owing to what little I knew about the film being completely polarizing. Tales of the lengthy Cannes ovation had filtered down to me, but so too had tweets that likened the film to an overlong, anxiety-inducing Chanel ad. While I had high hopes for Pablo Larraín’s first feature since 2019’s Ema, I left the theatre shrouded in a veil of disappointment.
Much ado had been made about Kristen Stewart’s casting as Princess Diana and her supposed fit for the role. While they got the haircut right, it is hard to see Stewart as the widely-known “people’s princess”—as my hairdresser remarked in jest, “she’s a hard rock lesbian, not a British mom.” It was somehow easier to suspend disbelief when it came to viewing Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the director’s other famous biopic, 2016’s Jackie.
The film’s premise is simple enough: Diana arrives to Sandringham House for a weekend of Christmas festivities but she’s hardly in the mood. Her husband’s affair is at the forefront of her mind as well as everyone else’s, be it the public or the rest of the household looking to keep the curtains drawn on their dirty laundry. Diana’s anxiety of being thrust into the limelight as a third party to her own marriage pervades the film, as does her nostalgic yearning for her maiden name that serves as the film’s title and the carefree childhood it entailed.
The distaste that her adopted family has for her is clear upon Diana’s late arrival in a Porsche 911, which is similar in colour to the worn-in olive Barbour jacket worn when plodding around the grounds. Her lack of punctuality is met with wearied calls by servants specifically tasked with keeping her on time then and throughout the rest of the film; she rarely seems to have a moment to dally and think. When she does get a rare moment of reprieve, she leafs through a book on Anne Boleyn that only heightens her paranoia. The way it mirrors her own marriage is unsettling, as is the fate that Anne suffers after uncovering her husband’s unfaithfulness. The Boleyn through-line is possibly the most contrived part of a very contrived film; the dream-like sequences in which she haunts Diana occur far too frequently. The fact that a servant specifically placed the book there to instill the fear of God in her rings a little ridiculous, but so does the idea of a monarchy. Larraín could have taken heed from Paul Thomas Anderson here, who deftly wove in a similar flashback in Phantom Thread.
One certainly feels bad for Diana given her marital strife, but that is tempered a bit by the sheer gaudiness of her life even if she wants nothing to do with it. Perhaps sympathy is hard to come by for the British royal family at this point in the twenty-first century. Where shows like The Crown depicted sombre citizens pensively listening to news of King George’s death, we now have moments of hilarity like the one in which BBC Radio One interrupted a live electro house set to announce Prince Phillip’s passing earlier this year, only for the beat to drop in perfect sync with the morbid news. Simply put, the austerity that most of the world lives under makes feeling sympathy for the leisure classes an untenable act, let alone for skeet-shooting monarchs.
With that said, Diana’s personability is best captured by the heartwarming care that the Sandringham House staff reserve for her. As the charismatic head chef puts it, they poke fun at everyone else in the family aside from her.
The general air of nausea-inducing anxiety is heightened by a brilliant score from Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame. With a slew of scoring efforts under his belt, the British musician has settled into his groove in film work. Overall, Spencer will leave you a bit cold, just like how Larraín depicts the rest of the royal family.