Spencer: The Inward Spiral of a Life
Driving and dead birds. This is how Pablo Larraín’s Spencer opens, and this is how it closes. A convoy of military trucks march across the landscape, tearing the quiet solace away from empty fields, rumbling over the carcass of a pheasant before descending on a serene country estate. For its ominous atmosphere, you wouldn’t guess they’re arriving for a Christmas holiday.
Biopics often strain against the constraints of their genre, but Larraín innovates by approaching Princess Diana’s life from oblique angles. Spencer curves inward on Diana’s life as she kicks against the pricks of life in the royal family, but it unwraps this from the narrow focus of a few days.
Kristen Stewart brings an exasperated, twitchy physical performance as Diana, but she also expresses her bright, emotional core as a woman longing for normal friendships, for a life unwatched, for a sense of freedom, for a few spare moments to herself. But she can’t quite grasp any of those, as the performative, public rigor of a royal locks her into an increasingly small cell. “They are waiting,” she’s told, and they always are. Waiting for her at dinner and photo sessions. Waiting for her to get dressed. Waiting for her to put on the right dress.
It’s a claustrophobic life, and Larraín positions us nearly always with Diana so that we, too, are trapped. The only divergences from her experience depict the kitchen preparing for meals with militaristic discipline or shooting excursions. Neither exactly serve to lighten the tension.
The brilliance of Spencer is that it evokes other genres to bring us into Diana’s world. It’s a prisoner movie as much as a biopic, with doors replacing prison walls, curtains being employed like barred windows, and lush suites becoming as barren as austere cells. Even more interestingly, it’s also a haunted house movie: Diana witnesses the ghost of Anne Boleyn on multiple occasions. However, Boleyn is the least of her concerts; in truth, she’s haunted by the specter of butlers and maids always lurking, watching, knocking at her door.
It’s these qualities where Larraín’s movie coheres into something deeply engaging. Jonny Greenwood’s score alternates from melodic to discordant at will, trading beauty for a creeping sense of displacement. The nervous performance of Stewart blares loudly against the restrained, nearly corpselike stillness (not to mention exceptionally British faces) of the surrounding cast. And Claire Mathon’s camera slides rigidly across rooms and halls, both hinting at Diana’s boldness and reflecting the constraints of her life.
There are a few moments in the script that ring a little too neatly, but on the whole, it serves to make a strong impression of the prison of grandeur that Diana is trapped in. It’s difficult to understand everything Diana felt and thought, but Spencer prevails by making the audience feel the pressure with her. We, too, want to break away, and the movie understands that. Its brightest moment finds Diana swimming through memories, dancing triumphantly through her life in rebellion from all that would confine her.
