AN UNWELCOME GUEST (SPENCER)

 

The dramatic life and death of Princess Diana seems tailor made for novels, plays and films.

Many writers have responded to the challenge - although a lot of preferred to dwell on the events surrounding her death.

Those have included the publication of thrillers like Aaron McCallum Becker's 'Whose Death in the Tunnel?', Tom Cain's 'The Accident Man' and Eoin McNamee's '12:23 - Paris: 31st August 1997'.

Other novelists have opted for afterlife tales like Elizabeth Dewbury's 'The Lovely Wife' and Emma Tennant and Hillary Bailey's 'Diana: The Ghost Biography'.

Isabelle Rivere and Caroline Babert's 'Lady D' took a different tack, speculating on what her life might have been like had she been able to walk away from the accident in Paris unscathed.

Onstage, David Bryan and Joe DiPietro tried to turn the Princess's life story into a musical 'Diana' which opened in San Diego in 2019 and then Broadway but mostly met with critical disdain.

A filmed performance of the show has, however, ended up on Netflix.

On the small screen, Emma Corrin won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of the Princess in the fourth season of Netflix's hit Royal drama 'The Crown' and she will hand over the baton to Elizabeth Debicki in season five.

Meanwhile in cinemas, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2015 movie 'Diana' with Naomi Watts was demolished by the critics.

There have been several God awful made for TV films too featuring Catherine Oxenberg, Amy Seecombe, Serena Scott Thomas, Caroline Bliss and Julie Cox as the Princess.

The best movie about Diana ironically doesn't feature her at all.

Stephen Frears' 2006 film 'The Queen,' with Helen Mirren in Oscar winning form as Elizabeth II and Michael Sheen as Prime Minister Tony Blair, focuses on the constitutional crisis her death almost sparked as a grieving public momentarily turned on the Royals over their response to the tragedy.

Now the Chilean director Pablo Larrain and 'Peaky Blinders' creator Steven Knight have entered the fray with 'Spencer' - a movie which imagines a miserable Christmas gathering of the Royals on the Queen's estate in Sandringham in 1991.

Much of this taps into the Princess' account of her unhappy times at Sandringham in Andrew Morton's best selling book 'Diana: Her True Story'.

Kristen Stewart steps into the role of Diana and the film rather improbably begins with her driving on the back roads of Norfolk to Sandringham in a Porsche on her own, with no security detail.

It's downhill all the way from there and I'm not talking about the car journey.

Norfolk is notoriously flat but not as flat as Larrain and Knight's treatment of Diana's story.

Despite having been raised on the Sandringham estate, Diana is lost on the back roads but is discovered by Sean Harris' Royal head chef Darren McGrady who is driving a Land Rover and is able to point her in the right direction.

But that's not before she reclaims her father's old coat from a nearby scarecrow.

Yup.

Arriving at the Sandringham Estate, she is met by Timothy Spall's servant, Equirry Major Alistair Gregory whose face appears to be frozen in some kind of constipated while smelling poo expression.

Much to her annoyance, Major Gregory insists on every guest being weighed on their arrival because of some Royal tradition that requires guests to be weighed on their departure too.

The idea is if they have put on weight, it will show how much of a good time they had over Christmas.

Reunited with her sons, Jack Nielen's Prince William and Freddie Spry's Prince Harry, it is clear they are the only members of the Royal Family who bring her any joy.

Within minutes of them greeting her, the three are ushered in for sandwiches with the rest of the Royal Family as part of a carefully choreographed set of Christmas encounters.

Diana tells William and Harry she'll follow them inside but then begins to wander the corridors like a cornered animal until she bumps into Sally Hawkins' Royal Dresser, Maggie.

As relieved as she is to be reunited with Maggie, the Royal household is still keen to assert its control over this aspect of the Princess' life - dictating what costumes she must wear on given days.

Larrain and Knight chronicle during the course of the film her struggles with bulimia and throw in occasional and often bizarre fantasy sequences.

A particularly fraught banquet sees her hallucinating the presence of Amy Manson's Anne Boleyn.

It also sees her consuming pearls from her broken necklace as she gorges on pea soup.

Diana clashes with Jack Farthing's Prince Charles about William and Harry taking part in a pheasant shoot.

She cuts barbed wire in the dead of the night so she can explore her old boarded up family home.

And so the movie lumbers on with one flight of fancy after another.

Maggie professes her love for Diana on a beach and that dry old stick Major Gregory awkwardly shoehorns into one conversation how he watched a colleague die while serving as a British soldier on Belfast's Falls Road.

There's a ridiculous conclusion involving a KFC.

I'm not kidding.

'Spencer' is simply far fetched twaddle that continues the poor run of form Knight, in particular, has had of late.

Having directed the excellent, daring drama 'Locke' with Tom Hardy, he has gone on to two deliver two duds as a filmmaker.

'Serenity' was a cod mystery thriller he directed with Matthew McConaghey and Anne Hathaway.

'Locked Down' was a frankly laughable heist tale set in London during the early months of the COVID pandemic which saw him direct Hathaway again and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Back on screenwriting duties, Like both those films the script for 'Spencer' stretches credulity and is just as irritating.

There's nothing wrong with an avant garde take on a famous life but sometimes it feels Knight is resorting to shock tactics just for the sake of it.

A throwaway comment from Diana to a servant to leave the room so she can masturbate is unnecessary and downright toe curling.

The parallels between her own life and Anne Boleyn's are drawn in the most gauche way imaginable.

A dance sequence is conjured up purely for whimsy.

Emma Darwall-Smith's Camilla Parker Bowles is never mentioned by name but hangs around a church sequence like the Ghost of Christmas Future.

With a screenplay this weak, what was a director as talented as Larrain thinking?

In some respects, it's easy to understand why he was attracted to a tale about Diana, having delivered 'Jackie' which dealt with the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination on his wife, the First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Like that film, he deploys vibrant colours and images - courtesy on this occasion of another French cinematographer Claire Mathon of 'Portrait of a Lady On Fire' fame.

Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood also delivers a daring musical score and soundtrack that fuses baroque, jazz and 1980s pop music.

However neither they nor Stewart's committed performance can make up for the shortcomings of a screenplay which comes across as unbearably smug.

Talented actors like Spall, Hawkins, Harris and Stella Gonet who plays Queen Elizabeth II struggle to make their mark.

Farthing is as wooden as the snooker table he stands behind in Sandringham.

'Spencer' is better than Hirschbiegel's 'Diana' but that is hardly a recommendation.

Some day someone will pitch a film about Diana that gets it right.

Unfortunately on this occasion, Larrain doesn't.

Lyricism can only take you so far when you have a screenplay as flawed as this.

On this occasion, the Chilean has underperformed - delivering not only a Royal dud but one of the most irritating Christmas movies of all time.

('Spencer' was released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on November 5, 2022)