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Content Warning: This article contains spoilers to the film “Spencer” and references to eating disorders.
Born in 2002, I’m part of a newer wave of Princess Diana fans. Even though she died in 1997, she’s still adored by many as an icon of fashion, royalty, and mystery. One of my prized possessions is a red knit sweater I found at a flea market years ago, patterned with white and black sheep, which looks remarkably like one of Diana’s own pieces of clothing featured in an episode of “The Crown.” Exact replicas go for hundreds of dollars or more on eBay.
Diana’s legendary looks have re-emerged recently in popular culture. For example, I’ve seen her “revenge dress” reposted on Twitter and Instagram with the infamous backstory that it was the outfit she wore after learning about her husband having an affair. Of course, the truth is that she knew what was going on the entire time. Given my and the world’s long-held obsession with the princess, it makes sense that the first movie I chose to go see in theaters since pre-pandemic times—I’m late, I know—was “Spencer.”
In preparation for the release of “Spencer,” directed by Pablo Larraín, I listened to the five-part miniseries from the “You’re Wrong About” podcast, based on two books: Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words” and Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles.” With my research done, the movie did not disappoint. The film includes details that I learned about while listening to the series, like how Diana (Kristen Stewart) would lament every year that the Queen’s country estate in Norfolk, Sandringham, was too cold, that the royal family was too stingy to turn up the heat, or that her father’s childhood estate was nearby and the children from the two families used to play together.
One element that is highly featured in the film, which does not play a central role in the podcast, is Diana’s eating disorder. While her bulimia is crucial to understanding the stress of her lifestyle and responsibilities, it is difficult to explain in under two hours the intricacies of any individual’s mental illness. Although the movie may have highlighted this element to more fully portray Diana’s distorted grip on reality, it remains worrying that the film does so in part for dramatic effect. What both the film and the podcast have in common, however, is expertly conveying Diana’s humanity as a complex person with her own issues, just like us non-royals.
The entirety of the film takes place at one of the Queen’s estates in the countryside where the royal family has assembled to celebrate the holidays: the perfect claustrophobic atmosphere of a bunch of relatives trapped together in the middle of nowhere. The story also takes place near the end of Diana’s marriage, so a looming, final disaster hangs over the action. The film opens with a wide lens shot of the estate as an entity that stands alone in a grey, rural area of England, as various important people arrive by car for Christmas Eve festivities. From the very beginning, the film has a wonderfully slow quality: time passes while both nothing and everything happens. Larraín strikes a delicate balance between being unhurried yet tense and laggard.
Of course, if you find yourself wishing things would speed up at times, the film has basically done its job. Diana, who can’t get out of the setting fast enough, also wishes the whole thing would be over as quickly as possible, projecting these feelings onto the viewer. The relative lack of dialogue supports this pace, given that every halting conversation Diana has with anyone but her two young boys, Harry (Freddie Spry) and William (Jack Nielen), is painful in its cruel honesty, strange formality, and uncomfortable intimacy. The stretches of pained silence are sometimes even more grating.
The scarcity of spoken language is countered by impressive sound design and a beautiful color palette. This combination is evident in a dinner scene on Christmas Eve, where, without dialogue, Diana’s world is squeezed tightly around her until she can barely breathe. She experiences a sensory overload created by the crescendoing live string quartet in the room, the suffocating pearls around her neck, identical to the set Charles bought for his mistress, and the pea soup she must force down that matches the green color of her delicate, chosen-by-someone-else dress.
The visual composition furthers our compassion for Diana as the outsider who desires true connection. The only relationship she is able to cultivate is with Maggie (Sally Hawkins), her dresser, but even this solace is taken away from her midway through the story. Maggie ends up being brought back at the end as an odd afterthought.
Whereas nearly every other character is kept at a distance from the viewer, Diana receives a series of almost uncomfortable close-ups. This technique mirrors Diana’s own lack of privacy; constantly under a microscope, she was scrutinized at home by gossipy staff and uptight relatives, and scrutinized in the public eye by the paparazzi that badgered her. In the film, it feels as if Diana constantly wants to push the camera away. But alienated as she already is, this would only cause further isolation and speculation surrounding her instability. Diana is also often framed in the middle of open space, completely exposed and with nothing on either side to support or hide her. The visual effect contributes to Diana’s epic sense of loneliness and the idea that she will never fit in. She’s the black sheep, so to speak. The cinematography is aided by Kristen Stewart’s superb portrayal of the mannerisms and likeness of Diana. Aided by glorious makeup and costume design, she makes you forget at times that you aren’t watching the real Diana onscreen.
One of my biggest concerns going into “Spencer” was whether or not it would provide a fresh take on a story that has been told and retold many times. Fortunately, Larraín proved to be up for the task. The entire narrative is compressed into only three days on a single estate. With the absence of other complicated aspects of Diana’s life as a royal, it is much easier to focus on the specifics of Diana’s day-to-day that make her life so nightmarishly restricted. Additionally, blurring the line between the real and supernatural is an interesting, yet effective, choice. Diana is visited throughout the film by apparitions of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), whose own husband, King Henry VII, had her beheaded on the supposition that she was having an affair. In truth, he was the one having the affair and wanted his mistress to be queen instead. The addition of this ghost can either be interpreted as Diana losing her mind—not an unfounded possibility given her somewhat warranted paranoia—or a fictive element that seeks to ground Diana in history and culture.
“Spencer” is a fascinating amalgamation of the past, present, and future, another one of the movie’s themes. Diana, fed up with the monotony of Sandringham, breaks into her father’s old nearby estate and is visited by visions of her younger self. She longs for the innocent childhood she lost due to her father’s icy parenting and loses touch with her reality, wondering what will become of her. The motif of stairs is also utilized here, as Diana stands at their threshold. The staging is a nod to other alleged events in her life: throwing herself downstairs while pregnant in a debated suicide attempt and pushing her elderly stepmother down a flight. We already know that Diana dies, but the uncertainty created here is real, as is her overwhelming inner conflict.
The opening title card of the film reads “A Fable From a True Tragedy.” Given that fables tend to have fairy tale connotations, it makes sense to think of this story as a fairy tale, that of a young girl picked to be a princess, twisted and turned on its head. Fables also have a moral, which is interesting given the film’s references to cautionary tales and to the many rules and ethics that guide its characters. While I don’t believe that Larraín had a broader message in mind for “Spencer,” it is still worth the watch to gain insight into one of the most iconic and misunderstood women of the last century.
Emma Kendall can be reached at erkendall@wesleyan.edu.