Fans of so-bad-it\u2019s-good cinema will have a royal field day with \u201cSpencer,\u201d Pablo Larra\u00edn\u2019s zany new drama \u2013 which should have been called \u201cThe Madness of Princess Diana,\u201d as it reimagines the late Princess of Wales as an unbalanced, melodrama-prone woman fighting for control of her sanity.
\n<\/p>\n
Set at Sandringham Palace in 1991 over the Christmas holidays, the film finds Diana dealing with the collapse of her marriage to Prince Charles amid a royal setting where she is viewed with varying degrees of hostility. <\/p>\n
Diana\u2019s behavior at the start of the film is erratic \u2013 she arrives late, claiming to have been lost driving to the palace even though she grew up in the area. Outside of her two young sons, she has virtually no interaction with any member of the royal family \u2013 her husband only finds fault with her while her mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, is clearly indifferent during the briefest of conversations. Her husband\u2019s mistress, who is not identified by name in the film, shows up at a church service attended by the royal family \u2013 and the aristocratic clan becomes angry when Diana, wearing an outfit that was not chosen for her by the royal courtiers, is clearly shown to be the favorite of the news photographers and the average Britons watching them emerge from church.<\/p>\n
Her only allies in this environment are a dresser who is abruptly sent away and the palace\u2019s head chef, an odd confidant considering she is constantly vomiting up his creations due to her bulimia. Strangely, this Diana doesn’t have a cell phone to call anyone outside of the palace, though perhaps that touch of reality would puncture the weird fantasy being spun.<\/p>\n
Larra\u00edn creates new neuroses to bedevil the princess including encounters with the ghost of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife who was beheaded when she fell out of favor with her monarch mate. Larra\u00edn also punctuates the film and Diana is given to spells of hallucinatory visions of her past, including a montage of Diana running in terror while wearing various designer outfits, including her celebrated wedding gown. <\/p>\n
In the film\u2019s most bizarre sequence, Diana leaves a Christmas dinner dressed in a frilly gown, slices away at the barbed wire around the palace with wire cutters and wanders through the dark ruins of her now-derelict childhood home while Anne Boleyn\u2019s ghost berates her in the creepy hallways. <\/p>\n
Larra\u00edn\u2019s production is prefixed as \u201cA fable from a true tragedy\u201d \u2013 a daring idea that explains why the filmmaker took significant liberties with a well-known story about a greatly-loved woman. The big problem with \u201cSpencer\u201d is Larra\u00edn\u2019s decision to externalize Diana\u2019s anguish in a scenery-chewing performance from Kristen Stewart as the princess. Despite her blonde Diana-style hairstyle and early 90s wardrobe, Stewart\u2019s performance is a mess of eye rolling, jaw clenching, hand flutters and dialogue screamed in varying decibels. She\u2019s no one\u2019s idea of Diana, but she does a splendid imitation of Rosalind Russell\u2019s wildly overcooked Lavinia in the 1947 \u201cMourning Becomes Electra.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if Larra\u00edn had been able to moderate Stewart\u2019s hammy eruptions, he bludgeons the audience with ridiculous symbolism \u2013 most notoriously with a clunky pearl necklace that Diana is forced to wear while knowing his mistress received the same gift. In one inane fantasy sequence, Diana imagines breaking the necklace into her soup and then consuming each pearl via a spoonful of soup, loudly crunching each pearl like it was a stale crouton while a music score that sounds like a bad imitation of John Cage\u2019s avant-garde excesses pollutes the soundtrack.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most absurd aspect of \u201cSpencer\u201d comes in its climax (spoiler alert), when Diana supposedly finds her spirit to push back at the repressive royals by disrupting a pheasant hunting session arranged by Charles for their sons \u2013 she walks among the pheasants, demanding that her sons stop shooting. Charles reluctantly agrees and she spirits the boys out of Sandringham and down to London, where they dine on KFC takeout on a bench along the Thames. <\/p>\n
In reality, Diana\u2019s sons have been active pheasant hunters long after her death, much to the displeasure of British animal rights activists \u2013 and Diana was not a KFC fan, but actually enjoyed McDonald\u2019s, though perhaps KFC paid more for product placement. Too bad Larra\u00edn didn\u2019t have Anne Boleyn join Diana for a riverside lunch of fried chicken \u2013 it would have been the perfectly sublime send-off to an utterly ridiculous film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fans of so-bad-it\u2019s-good cinema will have a royal field day with \u201cSpencer,\u201d Pablo Larra\u00edn\u2019s zany new drama \u2013 which should have been called \u201cThe Madness of Princess Diana,\u201d as it reimagines the late Princess of Wales as an unbalanced, melodrama-prone woman fighting for control of her sanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":36318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[2525,2842,1486,2843],"class_list":["post-36317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-diana","tag-kristen-spencer","tag-pablo-larrain","tag-princess-diana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36317"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36321,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36317\/revisions\/36321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}