Dancing with Scarecrows

There are films that try a projectionist’s soul.

Or at least my nerves, as happened last night when I first showed Spencer, the new biopic of Princess Diana.

Before the first scene, credits for production and distribution never include the film’s title while listing mostly German names.  Long names, long credits until we are treated to a flat landscape, farmland, rather bleak and hazy, with no voice-over.

Nor are there any visible characters or dialogue as we watch a convoy of military vehicles roll down a very straight, tree-lined country road toward an estate.  Soldiers get out to deliver large crates that you might think are coffins.

By this time, I’m panicking that I’ve started the wrong film. Is there a new German film installed in the projector that would fit this bill?

Finally, at least five minutes in, a convoy of limousines arrives, and footmen approach to open the doors of each.  From one gushes a dozen or so corgis all in a pack, tails wagging.

My sigh of relief may have reached the front row.  Only the Brits would do that.

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Spencer is a must-hear film.

No, that’s not a typo. Unless you count musicals with soundtracks, there’s no other film with a score that explores characters as deeply as this one. A string quartet plays when the royals are on the screen–we briefly see them in the manor–while a jazz combo plays for Diana.

The result is mesmerizing. As family tensions mount, the classical music becomes maudlin and rigid.  As Diana lurches toward a nervous breakdown, the jazz becomes increasingly dissonant.  When she does join and suffer her exacting husband and in-laws, the two sounds clash.

Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) comes to mind, but we hear Stevie Wonder only during the scenes with Black characters while Frank Sinatra sings only during the Italian scenes.  In Spencer, the music expresses the characters’ inner as much as outer states.  Moreover, this is taken up a notch when Diana renders an extended scene in interpretive dance.

If Spencer intended this “battle of the bands” to parallel Diana’s discontent vs. the queen’s iron will, the winner when it ends comes as a complete surprise.

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Everything about Spencer is surprise.

Following her death in 1997, Diana Spencer, who grew up on a middle-rung of England’s fixed class ladder before marrying into royalty, was immediately and unanimously regarded a saint.  Without dispelling that notion, this film counters it with a portrait of a woman chafing at royal restrictions with hate-stares, sarcasm, and an f-bomb or two. When you need wire-cutters to open your window curtains, you can be forgiven.

Before long, Diana starts seeing the ghost of Anne Boleyn, the queen beheaded by Henry VIII, who tells her what happened and what she must beware.  Soon afterward, Diana will talk of it to herself.  Anyone familiar with English lore will recall the ghost of the assassinated king and father of Hamlet telling him the same.  Followed by Hamlet’s soliloquies.

Scenes with her sons and her maid remind us of the Diana we recall and expected to see throughout the film.  While serving as relief, at times comic, they also heighten the conflict. When maid Maggie–played by Sally Hawkins, best known for falling in love with a fish in 2017’s The Shape of Water–offers her advice in an early scene, she could as well be loyal friend Horatio telling Hamlet, “Don’t think too curiously on it, my Lord.”

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It was the day before Christmas when, all at the manor, the royal family gathered, missing Diana. Or, as the queen mentions to her head servant, her problematic daughter-in-law is late.  And that’s when Diana makes her entrance in the film if not the manor.

Instead, she’s tooling around in her sports car, scandalously driving it herself and all alone. Late?  Who cares?  Played by Kristen Stewart–a “crafty and impressively authentic” Joan Jett in 2010’s The Runaways says a friend who knows much more about Joan Jett than I do–Diana stops to check out that brick-colored coat on a scarecrow. The coat will later prove as practical as metaphorical.

Such is the free-form jazz scene that follows the rigidly composed arrivals of crates carrying meats and vegetables, followed by the royals and their corgis who would feast on them. By this time, we know that this is not at all the film that we expected, and many patrons let me know it as they left.

“A surprise full of surprises,” exhaled one woman as if catching her breath.

Billing it as “a fable based on a true tragedy,” the film’s promos tell us that it is set during a Christmas holiday months before Diana’s tragedy and instantaneous sainthood. If you miss that, then the ending may be a surprise verging on shock. Apart from that, surprise may depend on the viewer’s age and memory. Diana is already in emotional turmoil when the film starts, and we are left to glean from the manor what put her there.

Just as we are left to speculate on why she is wearing an Ontario Provincial Police cap in the final scene, a colorful, whimsical counterpoint to the film’s grim opening. Wasn’t Kate Middleton the one who defected to Canada?

Like mother, like daughter-in-law? Like princess, like duchess? There’s plenty to glean and speculate on, which makes Spencer as much must-see as must-hear.

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