O death, rock me asleep,
Bring me the quiet rest.
Let pass my weary guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.
Spencer is not as irreverent as it might appear, or at least not in the way it seems. If there’s anything it encourages to reflect on it isn’t much the unsympathetic gazes of the Royals, as the hypocrisy of a culture that allows people to live in captivity, only pretending to really question itself. However golden the bars, they are nonetheless those of a cage.
Even if Kristen Stewart’s performance alternates some excellent moments, especially non-verbal, with less convincing ones where the acting almost looks blurred by the effort of finding the absolute right mannerisms, and even though the slightly uncomfortable unrealistic and verbose eloquence that shapes many of the dialogues in the draft I read have survived here and there throughout the shot script (like a convoluted metaphorical dissertation on the tenses or a monologue where she improvises as a pheasant lifestyle guru)1, there is very little to go around. Spencer is a magnificent film.
Pablo Larraín’s take on a material that could have easily led to tatty results; the supporting actors’ blazing display of bravura (I would watch any film that has Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins or Tim Spall in it); Claire Mathon’s photography, whose sensibility had already enchanted me in such wonders as Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Stranger by the Lake; and above all the phenomenal music composed by Jonny Greenwood. Everything works as a whole and seduces even those like me who didn’t think they needed the umpteenth speculation on poor Princess Diana. The beauty of Spencer is just as toxic as art can be.
1. To be anal, and for my own record, I also wonder if such lines as, ‘It doesn’t fit with my mood, it should be black, black to contrast the pearls,’ (referring to a sea-green satin dress she is supposed to wear to Christmas Eve dinner that incidentally will end up matching the color of the pea soup served that evening) or, ‘They dream but they are able to wake up, I am not allowed to wake up,’ (punctuating what Maggie just said, that people dream of being her) or again Diana’s sarcastic reply to a maid offering help, ‘How can you help me? No one is here to help me,’ could have dropped the redundant elaboration of the concept in second half to a more natural and even more effective result. But again, I genuinely just wonder. Other lines, like Diana’s first meaningful utterance as she drives in the middle of the British nowhere, ‘Where the fuck am I?’ or when she replies, ‘Oh yes, terribly,’ to William asking if she likes them getting mad at her, or later on when she wittily remarks, ‘All set, as if everything has already happened,’ are brilliant.
