Spencer (2021, Pablo Larraín) (Patreon)

44/100

I run hot and cold on Larraín but am consistently frigid (going all the way back to Dirty Pretty Things) when it comes to screenwriter Steven Knight, whose sensibility can best be described with the single word CLONK. "Do you think they'll kill me?" Diana asks someone within the first 15 minutes. "Just say you saw a ghost," she tells a couple of sentries later on. Not content merely to give the people's princess a speech about how she's really just an ordinary woman who loves cheesy music and fast food, Knight ends the movie by having her blast Mike + The Mechanics en route to the KFC drive-thru. On top of all the cringeworthy stuff, Spencer has no dramatic engine whatsoever—it's just two hours of Diana feeling trapped and stifled, with the occasional flashback or morbid fantasy thrown in for variety's sake. Larraín does take full advantage of the oppressive opulence, though production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (who's worked with Gilliam, Spielberg, Nolan, Mann, Ang Lee—but never more than once with any of them, interestingly; is he a gifted pain in the ass?) probably deserves much of the credit for striking tableaux like Diana raiding the walk-in fridge. Truly fascinated by Stewart's performance, which starts out bizarrely stilted (she makes Diana asking for directions at a diner look like performance art) and then...stays bizarrely stilted, yet somehow gathers a stubborn authority over time. Can't commit to calling it good, but it's certainly bold. Ultimately, I just don't see the point of these historical reveries, which do little more than imagine what a famous person might have said and done at a given moment in her life were she magically blessed with a degree of self-awareness and foresight that none of us actually possesses. Though I did like Neruda, so maybe it helps if I don't know much about the subject going in. Or maybe Larraín does his best work in Chile.