Spencer

Pablo Larrain's 2021 Spencer is a gloomy bio-pic chronicling three days in the life of Diana, the Princess of Wales, espoused to Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.  (Spencer was Diana's maiden name.)  The film is set over a the period between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day in December 1991, that is about six years before Diana's death in 1997.)  The film's opening titles tells us that the movie is a "A Fable from a True Tragedy".  The term "tragedy" is appropriate in this context:  tragedies involve people of elevated stature whose sufferings are exemplary in some larger scheme of things.  Often, the protagonists in tragedies are kings and queens and, of course, Diana holds this status in the film. Literary critics will remind you that the genre of tragedy involves a high or lofty style and that events are depicted in a solemn and dignified manner.  This is true, perhaps to an excessive level, of Larrain's Spencer -- the movie is resolutely humorless and morose.  Further, the picture is exquisitely shot in a languorous style on bleached 16 mm footage -- the movie's images seem grainy, as if a pervasive winter mist envelopes all of the principals and the dim, low-wattage landscapes through which they move.  Sometimes, the movie's stylized camerawork, with its morbid-looking symmetries and motionless armies of retainers and lackeys looks a bit like Last Year in Marienbad.  There are swooning tracking shots along grey canals and through ornamental gardens and, of course, the camera glides through the halls of Sandingham House, the royal residence where the Queen and her family are gathered to celebrate Christmas.  The interiors of the vast palace are shot like the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining and much of the movie resembles that picture, a high-toned and deliberately paced horror movie.  As the film progresses, Diana becomes increasingly alienated and, in the words of one of the lackeys, seems about to "crack up" -- she's severely bulimic and retreats to the marble and lustrous tiled toilets to make herself vomit out the nauseatingly rich food served to the royals by a literal army of servants.  (In an early scene, we see military men in a convoy carrying huge ammunition boxes into the draughty palace; when the soldiers open the ammo boxes, they are shown to be full of creams, lobsters, bloody cuts of beef and the like.)  Apparently, Diana has been confronted with her husband's infidelity and someone has helpfully put a book about the unfortunate Anne Boleyn at bedside in the chambers to which Diana retreats to sleep.  In English history, there are precedents for  how discarded wives are treated -- this seems to be the message embodied in the book and, lest we miss the point, one of the rooms in the residence is adorned with a huge portrait of Henry VIII (a copy of the famous Hans Holbein painting showing the massive King standing with legs boldly spread in his full royal regalia).  Diana has only one friend in this whole ghastly haunted house; this is her lady-in-waiting and royal Dresser, Maggie.  But the other Royals seem intent on gaslighting Diana into full-blown madness and so Maggie, the Princess' confidante is sent back to London.  Diana's psychological well-being deteriorates and she begins cutting herself, ripping out a chunk of her bicep with some frightening wire-cutters that she wields (the Royals have decreed that Diana's windows be sewn shut so that she will not display herself there to press photographers with telephoto lenses) -- Diana cuts apart the curtains to let in the light of day.  Later, she uses the same wire-cutters to breach a barb-wire fence around her father's manorial house -- it turns out that the Spencer family estate is located about 250 yards from Sandingham House.  

The film has little in the way of a plot.  Rather, it's a psychological tone-poem, a poetic revery on loneliness, alienation, and increasing madness -- as the movie progresses, Diana sees the ghost of Anne Boleyn and begins to talk to her.  After being inexplicably lost (she was raised in this part of Norfolk), Diana shows up late to the family Christmas festivities.  She's stalked by the Queen's Equerry, Major Gregory, a retired member of the Black Watch played effectively by the opaque and saturnine Timothy Spall.  It's not clear whether Major Gregory, an army veteran of the troubles in Northern Ireland, is sympathetic to the doomed princess or part of the scheme to gaslight her into insanity.  (He seems to have placed the monitory volume about Anne Boleyn on her bedside table.)  There are several sumptuous meals served -- a sole note of humor arises here in that Major Gregory announces the menus at these feasts, food featuring "organic" and "locally sourced" fruits, creams, and vegetables.  On Christmas Day, the Royals go to church where services are attended by Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles' mistress, an encounter that sends poor Diana more around the bend.  The cadaverous and brutally arrogant Prince Charles taunts Diana about her bulimia and plots to indoctrinate his two sons (Harry and Charles) into the rite of shotgunning pheasants as they are driven out of the wintry woods by a horde of lackeys.  (It's not really hunting but some kind of perverse target shooting and Prince Charles admits that he didn't like the exercise when he was young, but it's one of those things that Royals have to do; a shot early in the movie shows us a pheasant as road kill with a convey of military lorries driving over it; the birds are bred to be slaughtered in the "hunt" and these scenes in the film are redolent of the rabbit massacre in Renoir's Rules of the Game).  Concerned about Diana's fragile mental health, Maggie is summoned back to Sandingham House. She and Diana abscond to the sea coast for a brief respite from the insufferable royals and, on the tidal flats, Maggie confesses that she is in love with the Princess.  This cheers up our heroine to the point that she can mount a tentative rebellion against the overbearing House of Windsor.  She invades the pheasant massacre, takes custody of her two boys by charging directly into the line of fire, and flees to London.  In the city, she orders some Kentucky Fried Chicken, giving her name as "Spencer" to the fast food jockeys, and, with her boys, chows down on the KFC on the banks of the Thames.  

The movie is rigidly designed to make its points through symbolic apparatus.  Stated bluntly, everything in the movie is symbolic or some kind of metaphor.  The problem with the film is that the stakes are too low to support the cumbersome, if effective, machinery of symbolism deployed here.  And the symbols are, unfortunately, blindingly obvious, superficial and trite.  Consider, for instance, the opening pre-title sequence:  Diana is alone in an expensive sports car and lost.  This episode is wholly implausible but, of course, makes an important point about the protagonist's mental state:  it's not clear though why she is allowed to travel without guard or escort (is British security really so lax?) and how she could possibly be lost in her familiar childhood haunts only a few yards, it seems, from the manor where she was raised as a girl?  (The car that she drives is necessary for the film's denouement.)  She retrieves her father's coat from a scarecrow and, then, has  conversations with the highly freighted and symbolically charged garment.  Charles has given her a pearl necklace identical to a necklace sported by Camilla and the "choker" becomes a literal leash by which she is bound.  (In a fantasy sequence, she swallows pearls and, later, when she goes to her father's abandoned estate next door to Sandingham House, she rips the necklace off to establish her liberation from the Windsors.) The Royals, who are chilly people, keep the palace freezing cold; the poor pheasants stand in for miserable Diana.  Fried chicken contrasts with the luxurious victuals served in the palace and so on.  It would be tedious to enumerate the entire symbolic structure of the film but, in fact, this is more or less the only structure apparent.  There are other weaknesses in the movie:  the scenes on the beach romping with Maggie are a time-worn and kitschy cliche; and the whole notion of the poor little rich girl with middle-class tastes (she likes The Phantom of the Opera and pop tunes) seems glaringly inauthentic and contrived; if I'm not mistaken, Princess Diana came from one of the wealthiest families, themselves peers of the realm, in the United Kingdom, and her protestations of middle class values are a little like Clarence Thomas declaring himself happiest in Walmart parking lots, that is,a completely specious and inauthentic claim.  Whatever you think of Meghan Markel, Princess Diana was nothing like Prince Harry's really middle-class consort.  But it's a beautiful movie, with gorgeous visuals and a swooning movie style, and Kirsten Stewart as Princess Diana is apparently pitch-perfect in the part.  There is a stunning shot of her sprawled on the floor in front of a toilet into which she is disgorging her most recent royal feast and her white gown is spread out on the floor so that Diana looks like a spectacular fallen flower.  And the Royals aren't so bad:  someone says that they spend their time drinking and chortling about scandals amidst family and friends and it's only when Diana enters the room that the fun all stops.  From the film's mise-en-scene, this seems probable.