“Spencer” labels itself “a fable from a true tragedy,” which means it’s a biopic unafraid of acknowledging its speculative inventions.
Director Pablo Larrain’s coolly compelling chamber drama — dominated by royal chambers perpetually in need of better heating — tips you off at the start as to its central tragedian’s frame of mind, and spirit. Entering a roadside fish and chips restaurant somewhere in Norfolk, Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, asks for directions to the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. At the royal residence, Diana’s husband, sons, fearsomely scrutinizing in-laws and assorted gossips and de facto surveillance experts await this adored, pitied celebrity’s arrival.
Diana, played by Kristen Stewart in a performance surprising in its precision and quality only to those who’ve underestimated her since “Into the Wild,” musters the nerve to ask for directions. “I’ve no idea where I am,” she says, while Larrain’s camera isolates her in close-up. Stewart delineates a few, fraught verbal exchanges with the cashier as if Diana is reacquainting herself with the niceties of ordinary human interaction. But ordinariness remains a distant memory. Everyone in the restaurant knows who she is, and the awkward stillness sucks all the oxygen out of Norfolk.
From there, “Spencer” marks Diana’s conspicuously late arrival for Christmas, 1991, at the estate just across the field from where she grew up. Her childhood home has been declared unsafe. She has known a long time it is time to leave Prince Charles. She finds herself looking backward, and forward. The present feels like a straitjacket.
As with director Larrain’s Jacqueline Kennedy chamber piece “Jackie,” screenwriter Steven Knight’s narrative (more routine than the “Jackie” script) bores in on a finite, behind-the-scenes period of private decision-making. We see Diana in some quietly tender interludes (avoiding this or that gathering) with her sons, as well as scenes with various “helpers” and royal staffers whose discretion can never be taken for granted.
The rituals and ceremony on view in “Spencer” include lavish, military-precision meal preparation (Sean Harris is Darren McGrady, royal head chef) and bizarre, nerve-wracking traditions. Timothy Spall’s Major Gregory oversees the literal weighing-in of the assembled family members prior to Christmas Eve dinner, just for “a bit of fun,” so the explicitly encouraged weight gain over the next three days can begin as it has for decades and decades. In “Spencer,” we see Diana in the throes of bulimia, among so many other challenges to her mental and physical health. We also see exactly how difficult it might have been to carve some time for herself, even for that.
The narrative events are more or less straightforwardly relayed but rangy enough to include the ghost of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, in some scenes. There’s a surprisingly effective climax of sorts, too, a fluid, swirling sequence perilously close to a really bad “changing clothes” montage — yet it’s an elegant mirage, and the catharsis Diana so clearly needs at this point in her life, and this point in “Spencer.”
One creative collaborator above all helps make Larrain’s peculiar, compelling picture work, even with some of screenwriter Knight’s clunky Captain Obvious rhetoric. (There’s enough talk of royal “currency,” literal and figurative, to ban the word “currency” for life.) Composer Jonny Greenwood, who may be the best film composer alive, blends classical forms with freer, jazz- based expressions of interior distress like a wizard. The score’s in tune with Stewart’s carefully detailed performance, which steers clear of determined impersonation more so than Natalie Portman’s Jackie in “Jackie.”
Die-hard devotees of “The Crown” likely won’t like the taste of ashes swirling around in all that’s served here. But there’s more than one way to dramatize the public/private schisms of celebrity, and this way feels right for this director, this actress and this movie.
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‘SPENCER’
3 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for some language)
Running time: 1:51
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
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