After reading about Princess Diana’s meticulously chronicled life, it’s not hard to piece together what she did on any given day. There are news articles from December 1991 that detail her attendance at events including a benefit for the fourth annual World AIDS Day, accompanying Prince Harry and Prince William to a play at Royal Albert Hall, and touring a medical research facility in Glasgow. While filmmaker Pablo Larran does set his new biopic Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as a confined and terrified Diana, in that year and month, the events of that time aren’t what we see onscreen.
The film’s plot revolves around a sequence of choices Diana must have made while touring England. Already in the summer of 1992, a People cover commemorating her and Prince Charles’ 10th anniversary labeled their marriage a “painful phony,” and in December of that year, the couple officially announced their separation.
The film leaves this blank for the audience to fill in, hinting at its objectives in a brief epigraph that reads, “A Fable From a True Tragedy.” While seeing a recent screening, I had to keep reminding myself that I was experiencing a piece of art since Stewart’s portrayal of the renowned woman is so believable. Beginning in early December, a disoriented Princess Diana has trouble finding her way to Sandringham. It was a situation that invited me to suspend my disbelief for a few hours, even though royal correspondent Roya Nikkhah of the Times noted that the princess would have had no trouble finding the estate where she spent her youth and periodically visited up until her death.
She is lost and alone on a meandering road, but then she sees a scarecrow in the distance wearing the jacket that belonged to her late father, and she knows she can trust it for help. Throughout the film, she is seen wearing the same dress, which comes to represent her need for security, her sorrow, and the possibility that her former name represents a more pure, unfettered version of herself.
Of course, none of this ever occurred, but Spencer utilizes the Christmas holidays at Sandringham in 1991 as a set piece to show a decade’s worth of resentment and anguish. It condenses the years’ worth of turmoil she must have been experiencing into a single weekend, aestheticizing her trauma in a lush yet claustrophobic setting (such as her battle with bulimia and the suicide attempts that became public in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book, Diana: Her True Story, and the engulfing sadness she felt about Camilla Parker-Bowles, which she hinted at when she spoke to Martin Bashir in 1995).
Dramatic irony—the inability of Diana to anticipate her destiny as she cruises the streets of Norfolk in her convertible in 2021, 24 years after her death—is fundamental to the film’s depiction of the indelible weight of those feelings. By showing Diana at a time when she is actively thinking about her future and legacy, Spencer poses the questions that our collective Diana infatuation ignores. Knowing that she will only be an adult for around five years, how should we view her yearning for independence? We know that her sad conclusion will make her something of a cultural martyr; how should we approach the real person she was?
Analyzing Diana’s life through the lens of the story she never got to tell is a beneficial use of the imagined narrative. While Stewart’s version of the princess had a strong attachment to her childhood jacket and an obsession with returning to Park House, the real Diana didn’t appear to be very nostalgic about her troubled youth. Her bodyguard Ken Wharfe spoke to a sobbing Diana shortly after she learned of his death, and later wrote, “She looked like a lost little girl who suddenly realizes she is completely alone in the world.”
(However, her father, John Spencer, did die of a heart attack in March 1992, only a few months before she and Charles separated, and her grief must have played a role in her subsequent loneliness and desperation.)
Anne Boleyn’s prominence in the film is a further creative departure from the source material that works exceptionally well. There is no indication that Diana was particularly consumed with thoughts of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s executed second wife, other than a famous comment she purportedly made as a teenager about how it may be interesting to marry into the family “like Anne Boleyn.” To ignore the archetypal link between the two women who were used and abandoned by royal men would be dishonest.
An equerry (Timothy Spall) tries to teach Diana a lesson by leaving a biography of Anne Boleyn in her Sandringham bedroom. It’s a remark on how the “guys in grey suits” Diana despised maintained their authority through omission and innuendo.
Remarkably, Diana and Charles were able to keep up the appearance of harmony for as long as they did, especially given the palace’s usual efforts to keep a separation between the private and public lives of all the royals. A phalanx of press officers, friends of the family, and the aides who tattle secretly keep us informed about what goes on inside the palace, but interviews are strictly regulated and most of our knowledge comes from secondhand sources. Biographers and the palace itself frequently refer to the paradox of the unknowability of the most photographed individuals on the planet as the mystique of the monarchy. It is so fundamental to their identity that the family has gone to great lengths to control the media and avoid public scrutiny to protect their privacy.
Diana, throughout her life, was a continual challenge to this notion; her need to be truly understood and listened to caused unease within the palace. Yet because of her premature passing, most of the information about her is now secondhand. If we mourn Diana today, it’s because we’ll never get to know the 60-year-old she would have become, the one who, with the benefit of hindsight and some inner peace, might explain how her fairy tale became so shattered. Thus, Diana’s death has resulted in a more sad mystique, and Spencer appears to be ideally suited to investigate it by speculating on how she may have felt in her most intimate moments.
There are a few details that are off in Larran that take away from the overall picture and make it less effective as a representation of Wales’ marriage. The members of the royal family have been cast convincingly, but they lack the charisma that has made them such enduring symbols of British nobility. Stella Gonet’s Queen Elizabeth hurls insults at her son-in-law, played by Kate Winslet, and Jack Farthing’s Charles is portrayed as a sadist. Other stories have cited a gag-gift tradition, a commitment to practical jokes, and sitting rooms teeming with casual laughter, but Tina Brown’s 1985 description of a stay to Balmoral suggests that the Windsors aren’t that icy at all. The problem isn’t that the royals are cold robots; it’s that they have such impeccable social graces and quirky senses of humor that they suppress any attempts at honest communication.
Spencer paints the Windsors in a negative light, but it’s much more unsettling to see them as blind, self-centered idiots who drove Diana to distraction by pushing her to the breaking point. In the fourth season of The Crown, both Diana and Margaret Thatcher are put through their paces at Balmoral, revealing this side of the royal family.
Spencer has lost sight of the calm pluckiness that made her so appealing to people she met because she has focused so intently on her sorrow. It was reported in 1991 that Camilla and Charles had been dating for years and that Diana had also had an affair. In June of that year, she started having covert conversations with Morton to aid him in writing the book, and by the middle of 1992, the book was published, sparking a media frenzy. She is the “only member of the family to maintain a tribal devotion from her adoring public,” as Anthony Holden wrote in “Diana’s Revenge,” a 1993 issue of Vanity Fair. game too embarrassed to go to a fancy restaurant with them.
A toy marketing specialist issued a gloomy prognosis about Diana’s legacy a few months after her untimely death. “In some ways, it would be no different from promoting a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis,” the expert told Marketing Week in April 1998. However, in Diana’s case, there are no movies to keep her going. She is more difficult to promote in the long run because she is just a collection of press clippings. No one under the age of five is likely to recall her. I don’t see her as a long-lasting product.
This evaluation looks ridiculously off in retrospect. Her tragic end was a result of her incomplete life, but the questions that remain about what might have been giving new life to her story for everybody who sees reflections of themselves in the image of the lonely princess. Spencer twists Diana’s account in his unique way, but there’s still lots of room for investigation.