Spencer: A Review

 

SPENCER

What a difference a few years make. Since Twilight premiered, I have seen Robert Pattinson go from sparkling vampire to avenging Batman and Kristen Stewart go from lovelorn human to the late Princess of Wales. Spencer, an imagined glimpse into three tumultuous days of the former Lady Diana Spencer, has been highly praised. I see many of my brethren all but guaranteeing Stewart will win Best Actress in a cakewalk.

Now that I have seen Spencer, for my own view that is not an Oscar-winning performance. A bit too hallucinatory for most audiences, Spencer is more fever dream than straightforward biopic. Also, that is not an Oscar-winning performance.

"A Fable from a True Tragedy" as the film text tells us, Spencer covers the three days of Christmas 1991 or 1992 in the House of Windsor. While the rest of the family trudges through the rituals of monarchy, Diana, Princess of Wales (Stewart) endures what appears to be a break from reality.

She seems haunted metaphorically and literally by the ghost of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), another woman who married a royal only to have her head cut off. A Boleyn biography is left at her bed, and she finds kinship with her royal predecessor. Spencer's only consolation are her boys, Prince William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddy Sprie). 

Her disconnect from her in-laws might come from her constant tardiness, stubborn refusal to perform even the most mundane of tasks asked and self-enforced isolation save for William and Harry. If she talks to others, it is either Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall), Chief Chef Darren (Sean Harris) or her dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins). Maggie was sent away, something that so upset the Princess she had to be brought back. As she goes through her bulimia and mental stability, she makes a firm stand against the royal pheasant shooting, forcing the royals to give up the boys to enjoy Kentucky Fried Chicken  and her to contemplate her future.

Spencer is the second biopic of "Famous Woman in Time of Crisis" directed by Pablo Larraín after the brilliant Jackie. Unlike Jackie, however, Spencer's screenplay by Steven Knight decided to take a slightly more esoteric manner to its subject by injecting a lot of fantasy. The end result, I figure, was to make Spencer more a meditation on our Princess. The end result made her look genuinely bonkers.

Scenes of her imagining literally eating pearls from her necklace or using wire cutters to tear at her skin do not help the case that Diana, Princess of Wales was sane. Instead, it makes her look dangerous to herself and to others. The fact that Spencer does not have her interact much if at all with the Windsors also creates a false idea that she was more willfully reclusive than neglected royal wife. It almost seems that Diana willfully pushed herself away from people versus being pushed. 

When she literally stood her ground and declared she would not move until her children came with her, I was surprised no one literally took a shot at her given how sometimes crazed she came across.

Spencer so drowns in overt symbolism that for me it veered into parody. The image of the scarecrow, her referring to pheasants as 'beautiful but not very bright", her wandering around an old home and the Diana/Boleyn connection were odd to say the least. I think some in the audience felt this too given that I saw a couple walk out.

That in itself isn't a good sign, but that they opted to leave Spencer at the Alamo Drafthouse says something to their impatience at the grand manner the film took.

Kristen Stewart has wowed fellow reviewers with her performance, but I was not wowed. I didn't find she played a character but more an impersonation. Her soft, breathy manner seemed more appropriate for a weak Marilyn Monroe biopic than a Diana, Princess of Wales one. If Spencer was meant for me to sympathize with the late Princess, it didn't work. She just wandered about the film, forever putting herself through misery. Only at the end when she finally fled Sandringham did she show any sign of life. 

Granted, that may have been the point, but it makes things hard when you get a biopic that does not tell you much if anything about the subject. I don't know if the main takeaway I got from Spencer was that Diana, Princess of Wales seemed downright looney and the Windsors were lucky to get her out, but there it is.

As Stewart has to carry almost all of the film, it makes for hard viewing. She can look like Diana, and maybe sound like her. However, to my mind there was no there there.

In smaller roles, Spall, Harris and Hawkins did better. I would put that to the fact that they behaved like real and sane people, not borderline nutters.

If there is something to complement Spencer on it is Jonny Greenwood's score. It blended jazz and chamber music quite well, echoing the late Princess' fragile hold on reality.

Spencer is one of those films critically adored but audiences won't easily embrace. Unlike the late Princess of Wales herself, I think few will be fond of this Spencer.

1961-1997

DECISION: C-

Diana: The Musical

DIANA

I have long thought that any subject could be turned into a musical. Diana: The Musical sorely tests that idea. Songs that veer from the merely comical to the downright gaudy, with some simply ghastly moments and dumbfounding performances that will elicit either shock or outright laughter, Diana: The Musical sets musicals back at least ten years.

Diana covers the life of the late Princess of Wales (Jeanna de Waal) from her romance with His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales (Roe Hartrampf) through their tempestuous marriage and ultimate divorce. Diana wants more than anything for Charles to love her, not his longtime mistress Camilla Parker Bowles (Erin Davie), but that is a struggle for all concerned.

Watching and commenting (and singing) on all this is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and romance novelist/Diana's step-grandmother Dame Barbara Cartland (Judy Kaye in a dual role). As Charles has a lover, eventually Diana has one too, in the form of very hunky Major James Hewitt (Gareth Keegan). However, all fairy tales, even ones as disastrous as that of the Waleses, must come to an end, though for the Princess, one that ends in terrible tragedy.

Diana, like everything in the world, was impacted by COVID-19. Set to debut on Broadway, the show had to be delayed, and even the filmed version shows the impact the pandemic caused (photos of the masked crew attending the naturally unmasked cast end the presentation). Had it premiered on the Great White Way, Diana would have either closed in days or run for years for the same reason: near total ineptness.

Audiences either would have walked out in shock and anger, or sat in near stunned disbelief at it's "so bad it's good" manner. I don't think anything has come close to showcasing the woefully, wildly misguided efforts of a cast and crew since Springtime for Hitler.

In many ways, Diana plays like parody, almost trying to outdo Springtime for Hitler in tackiness and terribleness. The music and lyrics by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro (book by DiPietro) soon start stumbling over themselves attempting to ram as many rhymes into them as possible, sometimes with shockingly bad results. It becomes almost a running game to find which song has the worst lyrics, especially since Diana is hellbent on forcing rhymes at every opportunity.

I got tired trying to chronicle every bad rhyme in Diana, but the show loses no time trying to make every song almost comically bad even without rhymes. "Nineteen and naïve, shy and insecure, thinking princes never lie, believing love is pure" Diana sings about herself in the show's opening number Underestimated. My main question is "why is Diana singing those words about herself"? I could see others singing that about her, but it seems odd that she would express herself to be that way.

This is How Your People Dance, chronicling the Prince and Lady Diana Spencer's date, is one for the record books. "And then there's Charles, who's happy when/He hears music by dead white men/Perhaps his girl can turn him into a rocker", Lady Diana sings before everyone starts rocking out. This comes after Diana expresses a desire "to sock her" when thinking of Camilla Parker Bowles. 

Again and again Diana's lyrics come at you in an almost unhinged manner. In She Moves in the Most Modern Ways, which in part looks at her impromptu Royal Ballet dance, we're treated to such lines as "Every move was on point, she electrified the joint". I think though in terms of garish, gonzo musical numbers the most outlandish is Here Comes James Hewitt.

As Barbara Cartland describes the dream man, we see the muscular shirtless Hewitt rise from the stage on a mechanical bull belting out in almost rock-star glee "JAMES HEWITT!". If you're not howling with laughter at this, you then would be staring in total stunned silence at the spectacle of it all (or at the least, admiring Gareth Keegan's physique and bravery at this spectacle). 

"Ladies if your life has gone off course/You don't need no messy divorce/All you need is a man on a horse!" he rocks out to the swooning ladies keeping him company. "I can take you for a ride/All your troubles cast aside/You'll dismount satisfied", he goes on, and by now you have a respect for Keegan for getting through all this without breaking out in laughter himself.

Or at least for his physique.

Diana is flooded with songs: 25 without reprises, as if it was determined to be a wall of sound. With so many songs forcing many rhymes, you can't hold on to any great musical moments. The songs are not allowed to breathe, mellow in the mind. Instead, they are rammed through the nearly two-hour show.

Even here, the songs don't make sense to what we are seeing. Here Comes James Hewitt has the Major as some sleazy gigolo, but the show then shifts to present him as a lovelorn soldier. In Pretty, Pretty Girl the Princess sings "This pretty, pretty girl/was raised to strike a pose/perhaps she should fight/the only way she knows", but Diana makes the case that she was actually raised the be demure, not to "strike a pose". 

The only songs I think were actually good were two slower numbers: I Miss You Most on Sundays and An Officer's Wife sung by Camilla and Queen Elizabeth II respectively. They allowed for character development versus merely chronicling the situations that most viewers would already know. An Officer's Wife might have worked better if director Christopher Ashley had allowed for greater movement as Her Majesty remembers her brief time of freedom in Malta but there was such a stiffness in the presentation that it took away from a potentially good moment.

I Miss You Most on Sundays and Diana in general surprisingly made Camilla a sympathetic character. It almost makes one long for a Charles & Camilla musical, and it curiously diminishes the Princess of Wales. It comes close to being a musical version of the television movie Whatever Love Means. 

As a side note, we do have a song that uses that famous misquote, Whatever Love Means Anyway. What the Prince of Wales actually said was "whatever in love means", but by now the misquote is so ingrained that it isn't worth arguing about. 

De Waal looks like the late Princess of Wales, and like the rest of the cast does her best, but she has little to work with. That transformation from "Shy Di" to Confident Woman isn't there. Hartrampf does better as Charles: not bothering to sound like His Royal Highness and actually making him sympathetic even as he rages over Diana behaving like a showgirl. Davie's Camilla makes me like her down to where she and Diana confront each other in The Main Event, I was on Team Camilla.

Kaye did better as the outrageous Dame Barbara Cartland than as the stiff Queen Elizabeth II, as she has a role in the former and nothing in the latter. Keegan suffers from how his character is made out to be: sometimes cad, sometimes caring. 

Sometimes Diana can be too much. A case in point: the Snap, Click number, where a group of extremely enthusiastic paparazzi follow the then-Lady Diana in an admittedly exuberant dance number. Again, while Snap, Click has some ghastly lyrics, the choreography is big. 

Ultimately, the best way to describe Diana: The Musical is if Bialystock & Bloom decided to mount another Broadway show after finding something more astonishing that Adolf & Eva's gay romp. If one wanted truth in advertising, it should have been titled not Diana: The Musical but rather Springtime for Spencer. 

1/10

The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana: The Television Movie

THE ROYAL ROMANCE OF CHARLES AND DIANA

It's a Battle Royal between competing television specials on Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana premiered three days after Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story. Curiously, while A Royal Love Story premiered before The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, the latter received higher ratings. I think I can see why, as The Royal Romance is on the whole better acted and written than A Royal Love Story, even if it has its own rather cheesy and perhaps ghoulish moments.

As young Prince Charles (Christopher Baines) endures one tawdry princess-in-waiting after another, waiting in the wings is Lady Diana Spencer (Catherine Oxenberg), young and innocent daughter of Earl Spencer (George Martin). His Royal Highness and Lady Diana meet cute in a bucolic countryside where Diana literally falls for the Prince. As she watches over Earl Spencer along with his second wife Raine (Barbara Caruso) after his stroke, Charles is watched by the ever-efficient aide Mr. Griffiths (Ray Milland).

Soon her joie de vivre wins the heart of our older future King. She is not afraid of him and treats him like any man: throwing him off boats and teaching him a little tap-dancing. As their romance blossoms, they hit a few snags. Angry ex-suitors to the Prince of Wales, a voracious press and their 13-year age gap. True love, however, will not be denied, and he proposes when he returns from an Indian trip.

Diana gets a little royal training by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (Olivia de Havilland), though Diana is not afraid of doing things as she sees right. An attempted assassination on The Queen (Dana Wynter) and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh (Stewart Granger) will not stop the House of Windsor from completing their tasks, a valuable lesson to Diana just before her fairy tale wedding.

The Royal Romance has a major plus in Baines and Oxenberg, the latter best known at the time for her role on the primetime soap opera Dynasty. Perhaps Oxenberg had a leg up on the competition, as she is surprisingly a royal herself being the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and a distant relation to the Windsors.

Oxenberg manages to not just look like Diana, Princess of Wales but also makes her besotted love for the Prince rational as opposed to insipid. She also has a very gentle manner when it comes when acting alongside others, particularly veterans like Milland and de Havilland. Oxenberg shows that behind the soft manner there is a bit of steel, such as her comment that in order to have time with Charles, she should create an organization so that he can schedule her in.

She and Baines work well together, making the romance believable. When working without Oxenberg, Baines has a more fictionalized Prince to play, one almost comical in his frustration to find true love. However, he does well as a future monarch who quietly yearns for love.

I imagine that Milland, Granger and de Havilland were brought in as the 'name' players, and while their roles were relatively small they did well. Of particular note is de Havilland, who did come across as regal as The Queen Mum.

Surprisingly, The Royal Romance manages to do well despite having four screenwriters. Oftentimes so many people on one project makes things incoherent, but here at least they kept to a more lush, romantic even sappy story which is what I figure people wanted back then.

One element that did work well was a montage of reactions to the infamous photo of Lady Diana accidentally baring her legs. Consisting of brief shots of everyone involved, it managed to be humorous and horrifying depending on who was doing the reacting.

Despite some positives we do have some surprising negatives, ones that in retrospect come across as eerily prophetic and some that even then are somewhat silly. There is a clear element of 'fairy tale' in The Royal Romance that make the real-life story almost too unbelievable. At one point, Charles asks Diana, "Do you believe in fairy tales?" to which she replies, "Yes I do, I always have", a case of gilding the lily. From impromptu tap dancing to crazed exes, sometimes The Royal Romance came across as spoof.

There were other elements that make The Royal Romance less than what it could be. The subplot about Diana's parents' divorce seem to come and go, leaving Holland Taylor with essentially little to do as Diana's mother Frances Shand Kydd. Caruso and Martin's performances both during and post-stroke are more likely to cause giggles than tender emotions to where Earl Spencer's recovery plays almost as camp.

The sugary music does not help, nor does its 'love theme' Will He Love Me? that plays often and sounds rather comical in its earnestness.

Somehow, the image of Prince Charles standing before a portrait of Henry VIII as he is about to be reunited with his 'one true love' now looks as subliminal messaging. Taylor's Shand Kydd at one point tells Diana, "Divorce and second marriage is difficult for everybody". Many a true word was spoken decades before this royal romance went into the pits of Hell.

The film does end on a romantic note, but why CBS opted to have a plug for books on royalty plugged by Stewart Granger with the Library of Congress I cannot venture a guess.

The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana is a pleasant diversion that now looks as real as a fairy tale given how true life played out. Good acting by Oxenberg and Baines makes up for some bad acting and a determined stab to be lush and romantic. While now we know that the royal romance was a poisoned chalice, on the whole it is light entertainment with a hint of kitsch.

And to answer the question in the 'love theme', the answer is "No".

6/10

Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story

CHARLES & DIANA:

A ROYAL LOVE STORY

As it premiered three days before The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, I have opted to review Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story first.

We all can look back on such television films as CBS Network's Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story and its ABC rival, The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, with a hint of bemusement at how innocent the public was, accepting the Archbishop of Canterbury's assertion that "this is the stuff of which fairy tales are made". Released a year after His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales married then-Lady Diana Spencer, A Royal Love Story went deep into creating the mythology of 'obscure yet titled lady captures the heart of a future king', feeding perhaps a public fascination with both the power of love and the power of monarch.

Now in retrospect this tale of "the marriage of the century" looks almost ghoulish in how it presented a fairy tale that ended up as a horror film. A Royal Love Story even has moments that, in hindsight, look cartoonishly awful, not that the actual production didn't do that already. A Royal Love Story is surprisingly flat, with some actors pretty embarrassed to be there and nothing that suggests that it is either royal or a love story.

Lady Diana Spencer (Caroline Bliss), daughter of Earl Spencer (Charles Gray), is fascinated by Charles, Prince of Wales (David Robb). For the moment, Charles is more involved with her sister Sarah (Susan Skipper) but she essentially rejects him.

Charles is slightly despondent at not having a wife, knowing the pressures the future Princess of Wales will have adds an extra burden to his loneliness. He is also devastated by the assassination of his great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten (David Langton), who is his 'honorary grandfather'. Diana comes, hesitantly at first, then they fall in love.

This delights Charles' grandmother Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (Mona Washbourne) and pleases Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Margaret Tyzack). With some help from Charles' friends, Andrew Parker-Bowles (Jeremy Clyde) and his wife, Camilla (Jo Ross), the two lovebirds spend time together as Diana navigates her new life as first fiancee and later future Queen of Great Britain.

With the span of nearly forty years, A Royal Love Story isn't even good as kitsch entertainment. The story drags as neither Diana or Charles appear to have anything to motivate what is supposed to be said 'royal love story'.

Instead, we see some almost disturbing moments. The opening title sequence for example juxtaposes Lady Diana running after Charles, perhaps literally, with a royal hunting party. It seems as I said almost ghoulish given what happened in the end to start out this way. However, I do not know if director James Goldstone and/or screenwriter John McGreevey intended to send out some kind of subtext.

We also have the very unfortunate plot development of the Parker-Bowles being good friends and nurturers to this fairy tale romance. Again it's not fair adding what we know now to what no one outside this circle knew then, but I wouldn't blame anyone from laughing if they were to see Camilla Parker-Bowles giving comfort and romantic advise to a lovelorn Diana.

The scenes of their supposed love affair are stilted and almost boring, not helped by the lead performances. Either The Prince of Wales has a very curious tone or David Robb was directed to try and sound like James Mason. Leaving apart the Mason-like speaking Robb did, his Prince Charles didn't have any actual emotion. Bliss, to her credit, looks like Diana, Princess of Wales. However, sometimes she was unintentionally hilarious, as when attempting to show a mix of shock and horror when photographers tricked her into posing where her skirt didn't cover her bare legs. When she has her 'breakdown' at the hounding press, she was equally if unintentionally hilarious.

Robb and Bliss, even with their best efforts, have no connection.

Washbourne, in her penultimate role, was miscast as The Queen Mother. For some reason she came across as a washerwoman rather than a jolly regal lady. Christopher Lee looked simply embarrassed to be there as Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. To be fair he had very limited screen-time, but in the few scenes he was in, Lee looked so ill at ease, as if he knew it was all for some quick cash and hoped to appear as little as possible to avoid damaging his reputation.

Gray sounds as if he was going to do the Time Warp and Rod Taylor as Charles' aide really had nothing to do. Again, in fairness they had little material to work with, so one cannot put all the blame on them. Hopefully they all made enough out of this snoozefest.

Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story is more A Royal Slog. 

2/10