A Bad-Faith take on the Film ‘Spencer’
Warning: there are mild spoilers for the film Spencer below.
I have a rule about reviewing anything: if I feel like rolling my eyes at it, it’s probably not for me? That is, I don’t do hostile takedowns where I hate everything about the piece of art in question.
So, here, I haven’t exactly broken my own rule — I liked a lot of what Spencer was trying to do. I’m just of the opinion that cumulatively, the film’s copious visual and narrative metaphors provide no deeper understanding of Diana and the toxic world she inhabited in Sandringham over one Christmas, even as a reimagined fantasy scenario.
Paradoxically, there’s much to admire about the movie’s storytelling instincts, and at times, what it’s doing narratively reads like a description of a great movie. The story of Diana as concentrated into three days of her life is presented overtly as fantasy rather than a realistic recreation. Its characters embody only the loosest congruence with the actual appearances of Diana, Charles, their children and the Queen. Visually, we understand this film is not trying to be documentary, but to conjure a mood and atmosphere. Diana is a classic unstable POV character, imagining events that never happened, inflicting injuries on herself that disappear in the next shot, seeing people who are there when they are actually someone else or not there at all, speaking inappropriate thoughts to staff we aren’t sure are actually uttered, dreaming of past royal women who were discarded for being unable to fulfill their royal duties. The past weighs heavily on this film. It disrupts present thoughts and experiences, as Diana contemplates how her rooms are probably filled with the dead skin of long-passed queens. “Here, there is only one tense. There is no future. The past and the present are the same thing,” says Diana, trying to explain Sandringham’s weirdness to her young sons.
But the movie, like the character, has its storytelling arc stuck in stasis. That’s a powerful idea, actually: Diana as a flat character unable to grow and change, mimicking paper-doll nondimensionality, the woman stuffed into a royally-mandated series of Christmas outfits chosen by staff for family photo-ops. I think the reason I’m obsessed with thinking through this movie’s many metaphors is that I’m so bitterly disappointed they didn’t work for me.
Spencer is as stuffed with as many god-damned metaphors of every kind: visual, narrative, dialogic, as a Christmas turkey is packed with soggy bread. A carefully-chosen selection of them might have made for powerful, poetic moments of emotional truth bursting free of the codes of propriety that constrain Diana’s life, grounded in a tiny bit more realism than the movie conveys. Instead, its military amassing of metaphor is paraded relentlessly before the viewer, armored in its own cleverness. Diana, when we first see her, is lost in a place she knows well (how on the nose), having grown up there, but now unable to recognize the contours of this land, in which she drives alone, looking for landmarks. The Spencer family estate is abandoned and fallen into ruins, its state of collapse and disrepair totally impossible over the no-more-than 20-year timespan between Diana’s childhood time there and her return. Diana’s dad’s old coat is still holding together even while being out of doors for all this time, but the estate’s wooden staircase has apparently been made out of Popsicle sticks, so fragile is its construction: Diana falls right through its floor in places. But see here, the film says, do you get it? Diana’s family is in METAPHORICAL ruin. BUT ALSO LITERAL. SHE CANNOT ASCEND using those steps. All that’s left of their presence is a scarecrow, an empty shell dressed up in a costume. From this hollow form, Diana recovers her father’s a coat, an outer appearance, and tries to reanimate it by talking to it. JUST LIKE THE ROLE SHE IS EXPECTED TO PERFORM IN THE ROYAL FAMILY. Whoa, that’s deep!
And in a more nuanced version of this movie, I think I would have loved this poetic sensibility doled out in a more restrained, “the viewer must do some work to connect the dots,” fashion. Over its duration, we have these sorts of metaphors shoved in our faces with perpetual BUT DO YOU SEE self-congratulatory cleverness. Diana sits on a scale at her entry/exit to Sandringham, regardless of whether this is a real family tradition, because she DOESN’T MEASURE UP. She is fed disgusting glop by the staff, which we are told is the finest premium organic food, but is really green-dyed paste. Just in case we missed the umpteen times the staff powertrip over Diana with the most pablum-esque excuses for why they must micromanage her, I guess we needed to see a visual analogue for disgusting babyfood everyone else swallows without complaint. And not only do her pearls choke her metaphorically, because they exactly resemble the pearls given by Charles to Camilla, they also CHOKE HER LITERALLY. She force-feeds them to herself, after confronting the icy stare of Queen Elizabeth looking disapprovingly down at her from the head of the dining table. But that’s not all! She inhabits a palatial prison in which her curtains are sewn shut to prevent the public (which public, in the secure grounds of a royal estate?) from seeing her body in an indecent state. She has to tear the curtains asunder in order to breathe the free air. She’s kept company by her own visions of Anne Boleyn, because, do you see, she is just like Anne Boleyn: dismissed as unstable, soon-to-be set aside for another woman. At the movie’s climax, Diana stops the royal family’s pheasant hunt by putting on her SYMBOLIC FAMILY COAT and RAISING HER ARMS IN SURRENDER, because DO YOU SEE, SHE IS JUST LIKE THE PHEASANTS, beautiful and a bit stupid, as she has literally said to us in her dialogue with the chef in a previous scene, just in case we hadn’t been paying attention or something. As if we hadn’t seen her constantly the target of the family’s not-so-friendly fire under the aegis of TRADITION.
If you’re tired, reading that summary, it’s just as tiring to experience. And it’s a bit disappointing, isn’t it? Because each one of those ideas would be fascinating to explore in its emotional depths, as a way of feeling about the paradoxical situation of being a royal: unfairly blessed, and simultaneously, unjustly cursed in a way easy to imaginatively hyperbolize. Like Diana’s pearls, sticking in her throat and crumbling between her teeth, you can’t really bite into them to analyze them, because there’s nothing there: they crumble into dust.
Kristen Stewart, I think, really struggled with this role. As an actor, she’s brilliant for the way she creates characters in a natural, intuitive manner, often to the point where she doesn’t seem to be acting at all. My favourite example of her work of this kind is Clouds of Sils Maria, in which her consciously flat-affect performance gave me chills of delight and horror. But here…all I saw was the work? The work with the accent, with Diana’s physicality, which also seemed laboured, ill-suiting such an intuitive performer. Flashes of Stewart herself occasionally peek through, as in the great scene where her dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins) confesses her love for Diana. In response, Diana giggles uncontrollably, and as she does so, she sounds just like Kristen Stewart, which is somehow perfect, making the otherworldly Diana fully human for a moment. I believed her then. But in everything else, I couldn’t lose myself in what she was doing, because I was watching Kristen Stewart’s method for acting Diana and judging it for how successful it was (or not).
I thought the actor who played Charles had a better approach, not for a moment trying to imitate anything specifically Charles-esque, but embodying the disposition of a Person Who Is Like Charles (as he is envisioned in this movie). Stewart had the burden of Diana being such a beloved cultural figure that if she hadn’t tried hard enough to channel her in more specificity, she’d have been slaughtered for not trying, I realize.
And beyond this, it’s also that I wasn’t connecting with what the writing was doing to show us who Diana is? Aside from the way Diana conducts herself with her children, there is virtually no difference between how Diana speaks to Charles, Maggie, The Queen, or the head of the kitchen staff. I know we are in a fantasy dreamland where Diana is speaking what’s on her heart, rather than realistically in any way — and there’s some filmmakers who use that approach to wonderful effect. Yorgos Lanthimos comes to mind. But here, there isn’t any payoff to Diana’s confessions, because they consist of overly-clever metaphors instead of anything truly personal or vulnerable. The way we speak to various people conveys a lot about character: even if Diana was a rebel who didn’t uphold existing hierarchies, she likely had a stronger sense of self-protection than to confess her true thoughts to hostile chiefs of staff as they are cajoling her into doing her duty.
Diana the real person was an enigma. Constantly perceived as a carefree, open-hearted person, there was something very opaque and archetypal about her at the same time. So I understand wanting to preserve that opacity of her character. But what do we really know about this AU Diana by the film’s conclusion, that we couldn’t have guessed from the pop culture mythos surrounding her? That she had a vicious eating disorder made worse by the attention to her body that came with being in the public eye, further exacerbated by the control-freak tendencies of the royal family? We all knew that, I think. That she was an alienated outsider in the royal family? Diana 101, in my opinion. Maggie’s confession of love for Diana brings a single new note to her character. This moment gives Diana a much-needed emotional boost. Following this, there’s a cheerful beach montage where Diana and Maggie run around acting playful as children.
But what’s the payoff? Following this confession, Diana runs away from the Sandringham gathering early, her boys in tow. She rebelliously gets some KFC for them in view of London Bridge. So a declaration of queer love was only a pick-me-up benefiting a straight woman, prompting her to rebel in the most minor of ways by escaping from the royal shitshow. Maggie is left in the dust, having fulfilled her role in this film. This rebellion-instigating plot is queer fanservice that does not change the narrative surrounding Diana in any significant way. Diana The Rebel is something we likewise already know about her, whether that’s IRL Diana shaking the hands of lepers, wearing a bikini while pregnant with William on a beach holiday (prompting the Queen to say it was a ‘dark day for the monarchy,’ lol), wearing Revenge Black Dresses after her divorce, dancing in stage performances to the horror of all the royals. The real Diana’s rebellion is so much more public, Diana-empowering, and selfconsciously stagecrafted than what we got here, that I’m at a bit of a loss to feel moved, inspired or even interested in it.
The most painful twist in the film’s use of poetic imagination is that it brings no freedom to its fictional Diana. You can imprison a body, you can control a schedule, you can shame a person’s behaviour, you can belittle their looks, but you can’t ever entirely control someone’s thoughts. In Spencer’s vision of Diana, her imagination is totally subjugated to poetically reimagining her own conditions of imprisonment, rather than giving her agency to imagine the royal role as different. Here, she does not occupy the role of Princess to inhabit it differently than any of her predecessors, transforming public imagination about what potential good royals might do, and who they can be. As much as royalty is the useless vestige of power belonging to another time, the real Diana accomplished that beautifully.
