In “Spencer” — the third leg in a November Diana trilogy that includes Season Four of “The Crown,” now on DVD, and “Diana: The Musical,” now on Broadway — director Pablo Larrain does for the late Princess of Wales what he did for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in “Jackie” (2016) : He imagines a goddess at a tipping point.
In “Jackie,” that tipping point comes in the aftermath of her husband President John F. Kennedy’s assassination as she seeks to find mythic meaning — the idealism of Camelot — in his administration, tragic death and legacy.
In “Spencer,” the existential crisis revolves around Diana’s attempt to survive yet another royal Christmas at Queen Elizabeth II’s Sandringham estate on the Norfolk coast, this one in 1991, as a springboard to a life beyond royalty and her adulterous hubby, Prince Charles. To do this, Larrain and screenwriter Steven Wright suggest, Diana (Kristen Stewart) must somehow transcend the body, the physical presence, that gave Charles (Jack Farthing) his heir and his spare and the public and paparazzi a fairy-tale princess.
It is that body, however, Charles tells Diana in their one big scene — a tense, well-played moment set on opposite sides of a billiard table — that must double itself so that there is one body for the insatiable press and public and one for the private self. It is that body that is watched over by the estate’s martinet major domo (Timothy Spall) and the princess’ sympathetic dresser (Sally Hawkins) — each of whom have very different motivations for being solicitous. It is that body that will take her from the royal family — for whom, she tells her sons, past and present are one and there is no future — deep into her own past at Park House on the estate grounds, were she grew up, the daughter of an equerry, or aide-de-camp, to the queen herself before he became the eighth Earl Spencer.
Larrain’s camera and Wright’s script locate Diana’s body at the intersection of food and fashion — a place familiar to many women. At Sandringham, the Christmas feast arrives by military convoy, including from Charles’ organic Highgrove estate, but Diana is incapable of savoring it. Instead she alternately gorges on and purges the treats, as if trying to arm her inner body with food and, realizing that she can’t, ,needing to divest herself of the “armament.”
Similarly, clothes are both her protector and her tormentor. They shield a body under attack from bulimia, self-mutilation and too little heat at Sandringham. They make it dazzle. But they are also bagged, hanged and tagged — like so many of the dead animals shot on the estate — with directives on what is to be worn when on labels marked “P..O.W.” — for Princess of Wales. (It won’t be lost on anyone that this also stands for “Prisoner of War.”)
It’s not long before Diana, drifting off to sleep in the arms of an old tome on Anne Boleyn — Henry VIII’s beheaded, second wife and a distant relation of Diana’s Spencer family— is hallucinating Anne’s image. Anne lost her head literally. Diana is in danger of losing hers metaphorically.
It’s all a lot of hooey — hypnotic, haunting historical hooey but hooey nonetheless. For one thing, Diana was no bookworm, but had she been, it would certainly have occurred to her that Anne was indeed the adulteress Henry VIII accused her of being — not because she cheated on him but because she cheated with him on his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. (The same could be said for Diana. For all the pain Charles’ mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles (now his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall) inflicted on her, we Diana devotees have to admit that Diana was Parker-Bowles to other women whose husbands she latched on to.)
It’s also doubtful that Diana, who liked bling, would yank an expensive, gum-ball pearl choker necklace from her neck as if it were a yoke she could no longer bear. (In another of the film’s heavy-handed symbols, the necklace serves to segment the head from the body, just as Anne’s head was severed from hers. It’s no accident that the beheaded wives of Henry VIII — numbers two, Anne, and five, her cousin Katherine Howard — wear chokers in the musical “Six.”)
But “Spencer” is no conventional biopic. A meditation on identity and freedom, the movie works not only because of its excellent cast, led by Stewart’s brittle yet gutsy Diana, but because it remembers that art is not so much about reality as it is about psychological truth. And the psychological truth of Diana was that no matter how hurt she was by Charles preferring Parker-Bowles, she never forgot she was the mother of two adored, adoring sons, William and Harry (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry). In one of the film’s best moments, she, William and Harry play a soldier game that reminds you of just how much of a confidante William was to his mother and just how enchanting the child Harry was. (Oh, our darling boy, where did you go?)
It’s her love for those boys and her willingness to protect the vulnerable that brings “Spencer” to a conclusion — based on a real incident, according to Tina Brown’s marvelously juicy book “The Diana Chronicles” — that may remind filmgoers of certain vintage of Marilyn Monroe, another woman whose body became public property, in “The Misfits,” which was released in 1961, the year Diana was born.
Like Marilyn — and unlike the cool, brunet Jackie — Diana was a warm, fragile blonde with unfortunate taste in men. And like Marilyn, those tastes cost her her life. In Diana’s case, ithey led to a fatal car crash in a Paris tunnel on Aug. 31, 1997. Set six years earlier, “Spencer” imagines her at a moment when courage and love might’ve set her on another path.