Spencer – 3

Billed a “fable,” this is more a ghost story, about a haunted Lady Di. I lost emotional attachment early on, when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to understand Kristen Stewart’s breathy, stage-whispered dialogue and that the portrait being painted of a hallucinating, bulimic princess hounded by a monolithic, unfeeling royal family was so extreme as to be uninteresting. The triumphant, if equally unrealistic ending notwithstanding, I was bothered that director Pablo Larrain had capitalized on someone else’s celebrity to sell his movie then proceeded to trash her. Even the score by Jonny Greenwood, who did the wonderful Power of the Dog soundtrack, was insistently unpleasant. The redoubtable Timothy Spall and Sally Hawkins, in subsidiary roles, were the only bright spots, although Stewart looked lovely as usual.