Spencer (2021)
February 12, 2022 1:30 PM - Subscribe

During her Christmas holidays with the royal family at the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, Diana decides to leave her marriage to Prince Charles.
posted by box (4 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
(Streaming on Hulu now, in case that's relevant to you.)
posted by box at 3:20 PM on February 12, 2022


This wasn't what I expected, which would have been like an episode of The Crown, but it's full of great images and it succeeds in conveying its point of view. Like that show, it's clearly a combination of fabrication & dramatization in order to tell a good story, but the first half of Spencer is very stylized, and I guess it's "artsy" all the way through. We don't see the royal family face to face for a long time, just their backs, their voices, and their corgis. Diana is almost a Shakespeare character, declaiming mad soliloquies to an uncomprehending audience, and suffering dream sequences and hallucinations. Once I put this movie in the same magical-realism category as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover by Peter Greenaway, I enjoyed it a lot more.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:07 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


Massive content notes for eating disorder imagery.
posted by pxe2000 at 11:58 AM on February 13, 2022


Seconded, definitely not what I expected and that it feels like it's full of fabrication and dramatization.

Haven't heard about the royals complaining about this movie, though (?).

I adore Kristen Stewart, and she grows as an actress here, but the pre-release stills/ pictures made her look a lot more like Diana Spencer than how she looked in the movie. I saw her looking more Kate McKinnon (SNL) than Spencer.

The "soldier" scene. Does anyone have more background on that? It's an effective bit of storytelling, but does it have any backing in reality?

It felt like the writers want to emphasize exactly how weird the royal family is, especially Charles despite making him more anodyne and spreading the weirdness around.
posted by porpoise at 6:29 PM on February 13, 2022


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