The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, mooching around their Montecito stronghold and desperate to get out for the evening, are picking a movie to see.
It is written by Steven Knight, directed by Pablo Larraín, and described at the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy”—fancy talk for “We kind of made this stuff up.” The time frame is concise: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and December 26th.
Anyone who endured a film like “Diana” , who is sympathetic to Diana’s plight, though he is busy overseeing the foodstuffs, lobsters included, that are ferried to the house by troops.
“They,” of course, refers to the opposing team, captained by the Queen and concentrated in the frigid—and fictional—person of Major Alistair Gregory, who is played, in a lavish piece of miscasting, by Timothy Spall, one of the warmest of character actors.
Her presence in “Spencer” also answers a nagging question: Why do filmmakers keep on lugging the saga of modern British royalty onto our screens? Because it is the only costume drama that happens to have lingered, unaccountably, into the here and now.
In 1983, well before the events depicted, or cooked up, in “Spencer,” the Queen gave Park House to Leonard Cheshire Disability, a charity of which she is the patron—a gesture of no interest to this ungenerous film.
I can’t decide what made me laugh louder: the dead pheasant, stiffly positioned on the road at the entrance to Sandringham, like a prop from a Monty Python sketch, or the Prince of Wales informing his wife that “you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.” He sounds like a Pilates instructor.
For all its follies, I would rather watch it again than sit through further episodes of “The Crown.” The sight of that show clawing toward the credible, without ever quite getting there, is painful to behold, whereas Larraín is somehow freed by the liberties that he takes with historical facts.
What we get is not so much an authentic portrait Keeping Stewart company is a wonderful score by Jonny Greenwood, which mingles echoes of Purcell with noodling riffs.
If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than “Spencer” does, try “Hive.” Written and directed by Blerta Basholli, it’s another feature film based on a real person: in this case, a woman named Fahrije , proud and severe, who seldom escapes our frame of vision.
Somewhere behind “Hive,” I think, you can hear the far-off cry of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” which recounts the agony of Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, and of others bereaved by the ruination of their home—and which, incidentally, was staged out of doors in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, in 2018.
She learns to drive, she keeps bees, and she branches out, with the aid of her friends, into producing ajvar, a paste made from roasted red peppers, to be sold in a Pristina supermarket.
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