The Shape of the Earth

In Titanic, when Fabrizio says he can see the Statue of Liberty from the bow of the Titanic, this is obviously a flat-earth truther clue put into the film by director James Cameron. If anyone knows what’s up with the shape of the Earth, it’s James Cameron.

Aren’t we all sick of the biopic at this point? At some moment in film history, producers of the biographical picture collectively gave themselves over to their worst cinematic impulses and haven’t looked back. Spencer, though, is that delight of a film that defies its allaged type, a modern masterpiece that both is, and isn’t, everything you might expect.

Titanic is a cruel film, that rare disaster movie in which characters do not realize they are in a disaster movie. Somehow the most famous doomed vessel in history resists any portents of its fate. James Cameron toys with each character for over an hour, letting them live and thrive, befoire finally bringing death and destruction to them. The audience knows, of course, both from history and from and extended introduction which, akin to the newsreel in Citizen Kane, lays out the basic plot trajectory: the ship will sink. The Heart of the Ocean is a Rosebud of sorts, eventually lost to the sea as the sled was lost to the fire. Talismans of truth and memory often meet such raw elemental fates.

Like many disaster movies, Titanic is guilty of some degree of idealizing human nature, although refreshingly showcases both the best and worst human impulses in the wake of the iceberg collision. Class distinctions are always apparent, but particularly when it comes to deciding who lives and who dies. If it’s true that times of peril showcase our true selves, the Titanic is a brilliant example of a two-tiered system separate from, yet intertwined with, the obvious upstairs-downstairs dynamic of the ship: the polite façade of day-to-day life weighed against the brutal choices one may be forced to make in times of disaster. When the luxurious face of RMS Titanic is torn away, you’ll see what’s really going on under the surface.

Pablo Larraín’s new film Spencer is a momentary glimpse of Princess Diana (played by Kristen Stewart) over three days at a royal estate in 1991. Spencer is no Walk the Line or Theory of Everything; it’s not really a biopic at all, given that the lable implies something specific about narrative trajectory and informational value. You won’t learn anything about Princess Diana in Spencer, not her life or her fate following this particular holiday. Instead, Spencer is a deeply rendered character study of a woman at the edge of her sanity.  Spencer works whether she’s Princess of Wales or an anonymous woman trapped in a gilded cage.

At every turn, Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight zig where one might expect the audience, or the genre Spencer superficially falls into, to zag. Large portions of the film play out silently, where the typical period drama tends to rest on dense, load-bearing dialogue. Evading discussions with major figures of the royal family in favor of Diana’s children and three particular members of the staff — each in their own way and to differing degrees Diana’s friend and a controlling tool of the royal family — Spencer subverts the hierarchy of historical importance.

In this way the film avoids tired tropes of historical cinema. With the notable royals relegated to minor roles, the major roles are free from the burden of imitation. Only Kristen Stewart as Diana has such weight upon her, which goes a long way to explaining her long, downward spiral. Spencer is not just a film about Princess Diana; it is a film about Kristen Stewart playing Princess Diana and all the heaviness that role implies.

Contrast Larraín’s take with that of director Tom Hooper, of The Danish Girl and The King’s Speech fame, the latter of which earned him an Oscar for Best Director. Hooper, as I’ve noted before, is “deeply concerned with visual texture and surface” without much exploration of what lies beneath. The superficial — literal and metaphorical — nature of Hooper’s work stands in opposition to the way Larraín examines lush regality in Spencer.

Fashion icon Diana wears a series of memorable outfits in Spencer, all carefully labeled and planned according to the schedule of the holiday. The admittedly beautiful wardrobe nonetheless serves the purpose of obscuring Diana the person, obliterating identity beneath the fashion plate. Diana wages war with clothing, eventually trading outfits with a scarecrow as she makes her escape from royal life.

All the luxury of the manor in which the film largely transpires has a sickly quality to it, beautiful but empty. Like Danny Torrance in the Overlook Hotel, Diana wanders a surreal place whose ornate majesty hides the ghosts of the past and the rot of tradition. In the royal family, the world is flat.

Beneath the surface world of Spencer there is something tantalizingly real: a real Diana, a real world separate from the cloister of royalty. The arc of the film is Diana’s attempts to peel back that surface, to shed the clothes she is forced to wear and the curtains that shut off her world and the estate she traverses like an unwelcome phantom. Success comes at a price. For a film centered around a holiday so structured around food, actual eating is scarce. In one fantastical and nerve-wracking sequence, Diana eats pearls off of her necklace with the grimness of Eve eating fruit from the tree of knowledge: good and evil; the world is not flat; staying may destroy you.

Spencer in fact reads a bit like a “what if?” springing from Titanic: what if the ship had docked without incident? What if Rose had married Cal Hockley? Imagine the Heart of the Ocean locked away in a fancy museum cabinet, not unlike Rose herself in marriage to such a brutal, controlling man. Like Diana, she would find an exit, but it would come at a price.

Diana, like RMS Titanic, is a doomed traveler, but unlike Cameron’s opus, Spencer‘s Diana does not meet with her ultimate fate. For the two hours of Spencer, Diana lives. Like an alternate history — not Tarantino’s vengeful alternate history but a gentler alternate history — Spencer chooses not to dramatize the death of Diana, nor even to mention it. Perhaps death won’t come for her this time.