Movie Review: Spencer

 

Michael's Movie Grade: B

An intense and heartbreaking look at Princess Diana.

Despite being about the life of Princess Diana, this film is anything but a traditional biopic. This movie has a strange dreamlike and purposely unreal feel to it. This is because the film is more interested in putting you into the mental state of our main character than our character's actual life. If you are like me and never really paid attention to British royals or their lives, then you will still know very little about this subject afterwards. However this is not a fault of the film at all because what it does, it does quite well. The idea of feeling like you are somewhere you don't belong or that you are forced to live a life and be a person who is not you is something that all of us can relate too. While we have never had it to the extreme that Princess Diana does in this movie, we can still to some extant understand and feel for her. As such I could feel my heart break for her during many scenes and there were times the film could even be difficult to watch for this reason. Much of this though is not only due to her situation but to Kristen Stewart's fantastic performance. This is one of the best performances of her career and I am sure it will cause many who have written her off to stop and take notice. There is never a moment where her performance ever feels anything less than completely real. The emotion is also perfectly captured by the visual filmmaking of director, Pablo Larraín and cinematographer,  Claire Mathon (who has worked on plenty of French films including Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)), both of whom create a film that visually is as emotional as any on screen performer can be. Jonny Greenwood's musical score is also great and not only a joy to listen to but perfectly fit the action on the screen.

This movie does have its faults though. Though we get emotionally attached to our main character, the rest of the characters are quite bland and boring. This fault is at its worst when it comes to her kids. These kids are supposed to be the one light in her life. Because of this they should be some of the most likable characters in the film, but they are not interesting in the least bit. This movie also suffers from getting too into its own dreamlike state and this simply takes you out of the film. There is also quite a bit of dialogue that feels a little forced. 

This may be flawed but it is a unique and emotionally impactful movie.