96 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
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F
or a brief Time we knew her as Lady di, and
for a longer span as Princess Diana. But in the
end, whether you loved or loathed what she stood
for, no appellation felt adequate. By the time the
former HRH the Princess of Wales died in a car crash in
1997, at age 36, she had become just Diana, one name with
a complicated set of ambitions, joys and disappointments
folded within its petals. You can adore her or decry her as a
wily social climber. The one thing you can’t do is stop look-
ing at her: 24 years after her death, her specter is finding
life everywhere, on TV, in the movies and on Broadway. In
our imaginations, at least, Diana is more alive than ever.
She is also more mysterious, an enigma worthy of explo-
ration, something many of us didn’t feel about her 10 or 20
years ago. For a long time—the tragic nature of her death
aside, a terrible fate for any human being—it was easy to
take her for granted, even to roll your eyes at her a little. As
a royal, she looked fantastic in clothes—but didn’t she also
wear a pullover with little sheep knitted in, a fashion choice
that, pre-grannycore, swerved a little too close to the jeering
trend of the ugly Christmas sweater? And if the Diana story
was in some ways incredibly sad—her Prince turned out to
be a dud in the husband department, deeply in love with an-
other woman the whole time—she was also canny enough to
know how to play to her crowd. The “shy Di” Prince Charles
first courted—a nursery-school helper with a habit of in-
clining her head such that her eyes were almost completely
hidden by the blondish swoop of her bangs—later became
a poised, polished young matron who publicly spilled royal
secrets, avowing not so-subtly that she had married into a
family of monsters. Even if you had sympathy for her, the
superstar-victim routine could be distasteful.
So how Should we feel today about Diana? The buf-
fet of choices is so large that she can be almost anyone we
want. In 2016, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín released
Jackie, starring Natalie Portman, an intimate fantasy por-
trait of Jacqueline Kennedy. Now, with Spencer, Larraín at-
tempts the same treatment for Diana, with Kristen Stewart
as the tragic Princess.
Spencer takes place in December 1991, over a dis-
mal Christmas holiday at Sandringham, the royal fam-
ily’s country retreat, during which Diana decides to leave
Prince Charles for good. But the movie feels less like a cry
of the heart than a parody of a parody. Stewart’s Diana is
so unpleasantly self-centered that she’d be a terrible guest
at any Christmas affair. She’s late for every meal and com-
plains, endlessly, that the family hates her and is trying to
paint her as crazy. Meanwhile, she skulks about with her
shoulders hitched to her ears, looking as if she’s about to
pocket some of the royal silverware.
A title card at the movie’s start in-
forms us that Spencer is a fabLe from
a True Tragedy, and Larraín weaves
in fairy-tale elements like so many
threads of Lurex. Anne Boleyn makes
a heavily symbolic appearance at the
royal Christmas Eve dinner table, one
unfortunate Queen blinking a warn-
ing to a woman who seems headed for
a similar fate. Stewart, generally a mar-
velous actor, plays Diana as a mannered
doe—the performance is packed with
calculation and guile. Larraín may be
trying to dive into the satin-and-sad-
ness psyche of a misunderstood and
persecuted woman. But he inadver-
tently turns this Diana into exactly the
thing the royal family accused the real-
life Diana of being: a willful and pouty
complainer, or, worse, a megalomaniac.
With friends like these, Diana doesn’tESSAY
The elusive Diana
of the imagination
By Stephanie Zacharek