★★☆☆☆
The Princess Diana story is given an arthouse makeover in this infuriating mixed bag, one that veers wildly from moments of dreamy intrigue to risible scenes of high camp. The setting is Sandringham in 1991, and the scenario is essentially “a right royal Christmas from hell”. The central turn is Diana, played by Twilight star Kristen Stewart with the kind of studied intensity that suggests relentless consumption of the Panorama interview (the head tilt, the batting eyes) and fruitless hours with a dialect coach that have produced only a strange, strangulated whisper.
This could be an aesthetic decision on behalf of the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who made the vaguely similar Jackie, to reflect Diana’s constraint in royal surroundings. But it’s consistently distracting and oddly reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge. If Diana, as claimed in Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair article from 1985, truly was “the mouse that roared”, then this version is the mouse that whispered and had poor time management and an overwhelming persecution complex.
It doesn’t help that Stewart’s Diana, whether perpetually late for supper or flouncing around Sandringham in a neurasthenic stupor, is lumbered with some of the clunkiest lines of dialogue that the screenwriter Steven Knight has yet concocted. And, frankly, as the writer of Serenity, Burnt and Locked Down, he has produced some quality dross.
“Beauty is useless. Beauty is clothing,” Diana says petulantly when complimented on her looks by her dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins). “Those lenses are like microscopes and I’m the insect on the dish,” she whines when contemplating the paparazzi. “I’m like a pheasant, beautiful but not very bright,” she says when, er, contemplating pheasants.
Diana’s dilemma, as revealed over three days of torturously stiff meals, church visits and shooting parties, will be unfamiliar only to anyone who hasn’t seen The Crown; namely, she’s a touchy-feely moderniser in a depressing firm of unfeeling traditionalists. The royals represent little more than the stultifying continuity of history, while rad rebel Diana, in another line of ear-scraping notoriety, announces: “I like Les Mis, Phantom of the Opera and fast food.”
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Worse than that, if possible, the film consistently embraces the idea that this clash between Diana and the royals eventually found fullest and most final expression in her violent death, six years later. On realising, for instance, that she has arrived late for the Christmas shindig, Diana turns to chef Darren (Sean Harris) and announces archly: “Will they kill me, do you think?” She clearly doesn’t mean it literally, as in murder. But well, says the film, grinning proudly to itself, you know? You know? Wink, wink.
The Sandringham crew, interestingly, hardly feature. Bar a single fiery exchange with Charles (Jack Farthing), the rest of the royals remain in the shadows (they are even blurred out of focus in one scene), while the film concentrates on Diana’s relationship with the young William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry) and on her internal meltdown.
Here Larraín dives fully into horror movie terrain, shooting fantasy scenes of self-torture (Diana imagines attacking herself with wire cutters), scenes of mental disintegration (she hugs a maid who is immediately transformed into an older maid), and there’s even an unintentionally hilarious supernatural visitation from the ghost of Anne Boleyn.
Larraín’s touchstone is The Shining, with Sandringham as the Overlook Hotel, filled with endless corridors of evil, and the malevolent butler Grady replaced by Timothy Spall’s equerry Major Alistair Gregory. Spall’s characterisation, in particular, is cartoonish and overdone. He is introduced as a dour-faced martinet who barks at Diana, during their very first exchange: “No one is above tradition!”
Royal nerds have been quick to claim that the Gregory character is a fantastical creation and that the film is riddled with inaccuracies and dopey flights of fancy, such as Diana charging preposterously towards a hail of bullets during a hunting sequence. The movie, in its defence, announces from the outset that it is merely “a fable from a true tragedy”, which feels a bit like saying: “We couldn’t be bothered.”
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It also, however, has some good material. Larraín is too skilled a director to make an outright stinker. There are giddy scenes of release, done in extended pop video style, as Diana dances down those same Sandringham corridors, hopeful for the future. And, shot primarily in grainy 16mm, everything certainly looks beautiful. But, alas, as we all now know, beauty is useless. And beauty is, um, clothing?
12A, 117min. In cinemas from November 5
