Pablo Larraín’s Spencer opens with a label that reads, “A fable from a true tragedy.” The tragedy, of course, is the story of Diana Spencer, who became Princess of Wales, went through a bitter and public divorce, was largely beloved nevertheless, and lived a short life — at 36, she was literally chased to her death.
Details are not fussed over or explained: Camilla Parker-Bowles looms large over this story but is not named, because Larraín and Knight assume you know her, you know at least the vague outlines of her history with Charles, and you know how things turned out.
Even if Jackie faithfully recreates reality mostly in order to imbue it with unexpected elements of horror or irony , it is careful to make Natalie Portman sound precisely like Kennedy and to have its footage of the White House Christmas tour look precisely as it actually did.
Spencer is, from that opening title, much more unconventional and almost entirely uninterested in the historical accuracy of any of its details; it is intentionally not real, intentionally a “fable.” Other than the roughest outlines of Diana’s marriage and the cast of royals who surround her, there’s little reason to believe this story is literally true; it is instead meant to feel true, to say something true, and to change the angle through which Diana is seen, from a storybook princess to something closer to a Gothic horror heroine struggling to hang on to her grip on reality as her world tilts.
Confronted with scales on which she must be weighed at the beginning and end of the weekend, offered a series of pre-selected outfits she’s meant to wear for everything from meals to church trips, Diana feels not merely micromanaged and limited, but instantly choked by her surroundings, even as she finds refuge in the company of her children.
One of the men who works for the Queen, played by Timothy Spall, is a terrifyingly cold figure who seems to be everywhere at once, and who could have walked directly out of a horror novel that will eventually reveal that he maintains a torture room.
She sees parallels between herself and another royal wife who fell out of favor, and clings to her only friend, a dresser named Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins.
Diana has so often been seen in popular culture as either a perfect princess or a tragic victim; here, she is a woman trying to be proactive in her own survival, much like the “final girl” in any horror film must be.
There is — and honestly, there also was in Jackie — a bit of The Shining, here in the way Diana seems at times to be lost in the long corridors of the house, seeing things that might not actually be there, feeling that her mere presence is sapping her of sanity.
Greenwood is a prolific film composer, and has a particularly deft touch with what might be called the grandly unsettling: The Master, There Will Be Blood, and particularly Phantom Thread, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.
While her take on Diana’s voice rang true enough to my American ear, Stewart wisely doesn’t spend a lot of time physically recreating Diana with precision — with one exception.
Her performance here is powerful, and it carries this version of Diana through such instability as a character , but she always seems like the same person, the same good mother who doesn’t know how to begin to separate herself from the life she’s walked into.
But the point of Spencer seems to be not to reveal Diana the real person, but to treat her differently in a cinematic sense — to recast her in a different kind of movie than the ones that we’ve already seen.