Diana and deadening life among royals

 

   They eat the best foods but take no joy in dining. Surrounded by grandeur, they have become exemplars of stifling  insularity. A funereal solemnity embraces them, suggesting a form of social rigor mortis.

   These are the royals of director Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, a look at three days in the life of Princess Diana. Early on, the princess (Kristen Stewart) gets lost driving a small green sports car to Sandringham House, a mansion where the royal family plans to celebrate the Christmas holiday. With these royals, celebration plays more like commemoration.

   Larraín directed Jackie, a meditative 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain's fascination with the interior lives of iconic women pushes realism aside. Larrain introduces Spencer as “a fable from a true tragedy.”  

   No surprise, then, that Spencer becomes an increasingly  subjective chronicle of how Diana experiences the holiday with Stewart fully committing to the task of playing a woman desperate to reclaim her life.

   As Diana, Stewart talks in breathy gasps that, for me, evoked memories of Marlyn Monroe, another women locked in the gilded cage of expectation. Aside from her wardrobe and blonde  hair, little attempt has been made to make Stewart look like Diana, a move that wisely diverts attention from the external to the internal.  

   During three days at Sandringham, Diana is drawn to her old home, a now-deteriorating mansion not far from the royal estate. 

   The point, like many in Steven Knight's screenplay, becomes obvious: Diana longs to retrieve the self that she's supposed to  sacrifice on the altar of aristocratic duty.

   For Diana, everything is double-edged. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) gives her a pearl necklace. The gift puts Diana in a suffocating chokehold that evokes comparisons to Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII who lost her head. Diana reads a book about Boleyn and even hallucinates conversations with Henry’s unfortunate second wife.

   The screenplay makes only one fleeting reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s true love, but the point is clear. 

   We wonder whether Diana might have endured the burden of scripted confinement had Charles been an emotional partner rather than someone who, at least in this movie, pushes  his wife to accept a divided self. 

   Diana's supposed to project the royal image while realizing that her public posture never will fully accommodate her  buoyant personality. She must train her body to do things she hates.

   The rest of the characters reinforce the instructions Charles delivers to Diana as the couple stands on opposite sides of a large billiard table, another expression of Diana's terrible isolation.

   Timothy Spall portrays Major Alistar Gregory, whose sole duty involves protecting royals from prying eyes. His face molded into an impressive scowl, Spall talks softly but makes no attempt to conceal Gregory's authority.

  Jonny Greenwood, cinema's most original composer, creates an unsettling jazz soundtrack that drapes over the movie like a shroud and, at times, makes Spencer feel like an exercise in horror. 

   The score also underlines the impression that Spencer is driven, at least in part, by Larrain’s affinity for disharmonious notes. It also mirrors what's going on inside Diana's head.

  The approach is not without costs, the primary one being a sense of airlessness. From the opening, the message already seems clear: Life's being drained from this young woman. In a sense, nothing remains but for Larraín to tighten the vice grip of propriety around Diana's delicate neck.

  Because Spencer has a gloomy undertow,  an aura of unreality pervades the movie. In works such as Netflix’s enormously popular The Crown, royals don’t always seem like figures borrowed from a wax museum. Not here.

   Only Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana’s dresser, sees the princess as a human being and Charles sends her away, depriving Diana of even momentary possibilities for intimacy.

   Diana suffered from bulimia and Larraín uses her malady metaphorically, a dubious choice, I think. She can’t stomach the royal food that nourishes so much rigid conformity. When her liberating break-out arrives at the film’s end, she  takes her sons (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently, she’s willing to give up a seat at the royal table to consume the food of the people. 

   Larrain uses his considerable skills to create a change-resistant world in which, as someone puts it, there can be no past or future, only a ceremonial sameness. I guess that makes Spencer a sophisticated movie with a simple point: No one should be expected to endure the horrors of so much suffocating  isolation.

The ordeal of an iconic First Lady

Natalie Portman stars in director Pablo Larrain's Jackie

The day of President Kennedy's funeral, I and several college pals were positioned directly across from the White House. We'd driven from New Jersey to arrive in DC in time for the somber spectacle. We saw the horse-drawn caisson that carried the president's flag-draped coffin. We heard the hollow sound of hoofs on concrete as the caisson rolled past. We heard the Navy band playing Chopin's inexorably grim funeral march. We saw the riderless horse, a backward boot in its stirrup.

We also saw dignitaries pouring out of the White House, where the funeral procession had traveled after leaving the Capitol: Jacqueline Kennedy, Bobby and Teddy, of course. But I most remember the diminutive Haile Selassie of Ethiopia walking next to the towering Charles de Gaulle, one of the world's great physical mismatches.

The deep sadness and magisterial pomp of the moment was so incredible, none of it felt real.

Somehow we sensed that the nation not only was burying a president, but its belief in a reality protected from extremes. From that moment on, we knew we could discount nothing.

All of that came flooding back to me while watching director Pablo Larrain's Jackie, a movie in which Natalie Portman plays the First Lady whose brave and composed public presence told the rest of us how we were supposed to respond to the unthinkable demise of a president we viewed as invincible and robust.

Larrain uses his camera to turn Jackie into a floating, near spectral presence while at the same time trying to make her as real as the presidential blood that spotted her pink Chanel suit, the one she wore with a pillbox hat. There's a near ethereal quality to Portman's performance, the sense of a woman in the midst of shock, grief and the isolation that came not only from losing a husband, but from living inside the Kennedy mythology.

The movie begins in Dallas and carries through to the state funeral that Jackie planned. Its story is built around a shop-worn contrivance. A journalist (Billy Crudup) travels to Hyannis Port, Mass. to interview Mrs. Kennedy at the Kennedy compound. I couldn't make sense out of Crudup's performance, which seems to lack a great deal of compassion for Mrs. Kennedy and which seems out of synch with the way the country responded to the events of November, 1963.

Mrs. Kennedy tells Crudup's character her version of the events surrounding the assassination. She sometimes reacts in revealing ways that she insists must be kept out of print. She's doing her duty to protect what she knew would become a legend.

The movie makes reference to a famous 1962 televised tour that Jackie gave of the White House in which she sounded doll-like and light-headed. It may help younger audiences to know that comedians used to make fun of Jackie's voice.

Larrain has gone to great lengths to replicate the interior of the White House; he certainly succeeds in creating a credible environment.

Alas, not all of the casting functions in the same way. John Carroll Lynch looks nothing like Lyndon Johnson. Peter Sarsgaard is even less convincing as Robert F. Kennedy. We see glimpses of JFK, who's played by Danish actor Caspar Phillipson.

These missteps are important because for the movie consistently to work, we must believe we're watching real people -- not half-cooked, shadow-play representations.

If there's a point here, it has to do with the notion that during the Kennedy days, the White House was regarded as a modern Camelot, a place where art was respected and people comported themselves with dignity and grace. It was the grandest of illusions, and Jacqueline Kennedy helped to create and sustain it.

There's unquestionable allure in getting behind the scenes -- in seeing a partly speculative account of what led to the moment when I found myself across from the White House.

But it's not always clear what Larrain is after: He gives us a scene in which Jackie meets with a priest (John Hurt), who advises her that the big questions with which she's grappling may be unanswerable. You also may feel you're watching what happens when a heretofore supporting player suddenly finds herself thrust into a central role in a very public drama.

At times, it also feels as if the movie is about the weight of emptiness inside Camelot after the king has died.

Jackie may be about all those things: I suppose Larrain wants us to think that Jackie knew that Camelot was an illusion but somehow managed to believe in it anyway.

Another look at wayward priests

A difficult, perplexing and punishing movie from Chile.

Just what the Catholic Church needed, another reminder about wayward priests.

Like it or not, Chilean director Pablo Larrain has weighed in on the issue of church scandals with an odd and difficult movie that focuses on four defrocked priests, a nun, an inquisitor from the Vatican and a greyhound dog.

The movie's quintet of exiled religious rogues lives in the isolated coastal town of La Boca. They've been sent to this sleepy, seaside village for a mixture of punishment and penance -- and to be hidden from public view.

Things seem to be going smoothly enough until a new resident arrives. The others rightly see the presence of this recently defrocked priest as possibly disruptive. It doesn't take long before one of the town's fishermen -- a former altar boy -- is outside the house screaming at the new arrival, describing -- in excruciatingly graphic detail -- the way in which he was sexually abused.

Clearly disturbed, the priest responds by shooting himself in the head.

That's a bit of a spoiler, but you should know that most of the movie involves the repercussions felt by these sinning priests and the wily nun who tends to them.

The situation becomes critical when another priest -- this one a representative of the church -- arrives to conduct an investigation.

It should be noted that the men are free to leave; they're not prisoners; they've consented to this strange banishment, a situation in which none totally admits to wrongdoing. They seem to reinforce their communal sense of denial.

The priests still observe Catholic ritual, but they allow themselves one diversion: They train and race a lone greyhound, putting their winnings aside for expenses.

Larrain tries to see these priests in clear-eyed fashions. They're flawed men burdened by bitterness, defiance, self-aggrandizement and, in one case, dementia, but they're not particularly remorseful.

The former altar boy, whose relentless taunts echo throughout the movie, wobbles his way through the story as the church's representative conducts his inquiry.

It takes some time before we get any sort of handle on this interrogator, who has his own ideas about how to balance compassion with the institutional need of the church to insulate itself from scandal.

I can't say that I totally understand the ways in which Larrain plays with symbolism; a bizarre and difficult to watch late-picture event -- part sacrifice, part punishment -- makes a cruel piece de resistance to a cruel, arduous and, I'm afraid, perplexing exercise in bleakness.

Larrain's movie is commendably serious, but it also brims with the kind of rabid determination that feels as if it's rebuking those who might raise even the mildest of objections to its thoroughgoing rancor.

Of course, no one approves of pedophile priests or a clergy that collaborates with torturers, but The Club seems to regard aberrant behavior as an excuse to flagellate not only the movie's characters, but the audience, as well.

If I had to articulate a point to all of this, it might be that every status quo will go to great lengths to preserve itself and those whose interests depend on it, and that, in the process, there will be pain.

Selling the overthrow of a dictator

No offers a telling look at how Pinochet was ousted.
In 1988, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet presumed that he had the muscle to survive a plebiscite on his rule, a victory that would squelch opposition while creating the illusion that the Chilean strongman had popular support. As we now know, Pinochet's rule came to an end. To his and many other people's amazement, Pinochet lost the plebiscite.

The movie No tells the story of that momentous vote through an unusual and narrow perspective, the ad campaign that was mounted against the Chilean strongman.

No was shot video-style (more on this later) in an apparent effort to match some of the original advertisements that were used by the campaign to oust Pinochet, ads that appeared on TV during a 15-minute, government-dictated time slot.

The story centers on Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young hotshot in Chile's advertising business. Rene more or less stumbles into the "No" campaign. For the most part, he's apolitical, a mindset that seems to have contributed to his estrangement from his more politically oriented wife (Antonia Zegers). The couple's young son lives with Rene, but he wishes that his wife would return home.

To the credit of director Pablo Larrain , the story doesn't morph into the expected tale of personal transformation: Rene's mind seems to expand a bit as the movie progresses, but he's no Che in waiting.

Rene learns what it's like to find himself on what many of his advertising pals view as the "wrong" side an issue, but he never entirely gives up the benefits that derive from his skills as an adman. It's almost as if the "No" campaign takes Rene from happy indifference to troubled ambivalence, hardly a radical leap.

Rene's boss -- played by Alfred Castro -- continually seeks to remind his talented young employee about where his bread is buttered, and Rene's hopped-up approach to advertising doesn't always play well with the political types behind the "No" campaign. They want to emphasize Pinochet's worst abuses.

Rene, whose immaturity is suggested by the fact that he likes to zip around on a skateboard, thinks the best way to sell "no" is by getting people to think "yes." Put another way, he's selling folks what most ads promise, a happy future.

One drawback: Larrain reportedly used video equipment of the period to make his film. I'm enough of a visual snob to say that I would have preferred a better-looking production, and the ads themselves can begin to feel repetitive.

Having said that, it's still worth noting that No manages -- through storytelling and the use of real ads and recreations -- to encapsulate part of the story about how the Pinochet regime received the boot.

I don't know enough about Chilean history to know whether the movie is spot-on. But Bernal's appealing performance and Larrain's view of the ways in which people can be manipulated combine for an intriguing take on how well-applied grease can help the wheels of history to turn.