Spencer

          Kirsten Stewart in “Spencer.” Photo courtesy of Pablo Larrain via IMDB

Like an angel hovering over this season of miracles, Diana Princess of Wales is everywhere these days, almost a quarter-century after her tragic death.

She's the subject of documentary series on PBS and CNN. She is a principal character on Netflix's multi-Emmy-winning “The Crown.” She sings and dances in “Diana, The Musical” on Broadway. And now early Academy Award forecasts have Kristen Stewart high in the Best Actress race for portraying her in “Spencer.” 

For those not up on their Princess Di trivia, Spencer was her family name before she married Prince Charles and signed on for the fairy tale. “Spencer” is set a decade after they wed, spanning three days of a royal family Christmas holiday celebration at their magnificent Sandringham country estate. 

Celebration isn't really the word for the tightly regimented goings-on in the opulent environs where every move is a matter of protocol and even Diana's wardrobe has been preselected, the clothing tagged on the rack for her many costume changes through the day. She has dressers to help, as though she can't clothe herself, although with the exception of her old confidante Maggie (Sally Hawkins), she sees them as jailers and spies on her every mood.

In Sandringham's walls nothing goes unheard, Maggie reminds her. The sentiment is echoed by the stiff upper-lipped, but beady-eyed and weak chinned head of security Major Alistar Gregory (Timothy Spall). He's there ostensibly to protect her and the family from the paparazzi like hyenas lurking at the gate.

Whether Diana is paranoid, or acutely aware of her predicament is the question posed by Steven Knight's moody script. Too bad for him the title “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” was already taken.

Director Pablo Larrain joins scriptwriter Knight taking lots of license with actual events that may or may not have happened,. They call their story “a fable from a true tragedy.” The film's setting is almost a character in the cast – like the empty hotel in “The Shining” – along with Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry as young William and Harry; Stella Gonet as her highness, the mother-in-law; and Jack Farthing as Charles, whose cold-fish demeanor masks his talent for gaslighting his clearly vulnerable wife.

Park House, the mansion where Diana grew up, happens to be adjacent to the Sandringham estate, triggering happier memories for the distraught princess. Sandringham's palatial kitchen and endless corridors leading to one drawing room after another are opulently decorated but kept freezing cold, apparently a royal family tradition. Park House next door, in contrast, is now boarded up, inhabited by ghosts.

Diana's mind is also inhabited by ghosts – notably that of Ann Boleyn, second of Henry VIII's six wives, whom he had beheaded in order to marry the next one.

Diana can relate. Her husband's love of his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles is hardly a secret, and Diana's behavior in response has become increasingly erratic, including bulimic purges and cutting herself as she grows more desperate. For all the grandeur of the setting, often shot from a distance to make it appear even larger, for the princess it is the proverbial gilded cage, a claustrophobic nightmare.

Knowing how the story is going to end eventually doesn't make the film's attempt at a happy, if temporary, ending very believable. And neither – in my eyes, at least – does Stewart's portrayal.

While “Spencer” illustrates the horrible predicament she finds herself in, at its end you don't feel like you know the “real” Diana any better than you did at the film's beginning. In this regard “Spencer” comes in second to the currently rerunning CNN series, that gives a lot more details of her demons as well as her triumphs and the beatific effect she had in her world. But the documentary also falls victim to the Diana dilemma – giving us other people's versions of what she was, but leaving the truth unknown.

What was it about this woman that made her such a magnet for strangers' blind love, and a such a target for the media jackals dogging her every step? Hardly a vestal virgin, she still was innocent, undeserving of the fate awaiting her. And what does it say about us that we're still martyring her and obsessing over the remains all these decades later? 

It's a mystery. But it sounds like the stuff saints are made of to me.