And yet I loved Jackie so! Pablo Larraín’s 2016 film about Jackie Kennedy’s grief and her creation of the Camelot myth in the week after JFK’s assassination swept me away. “So original, enveloping and moving,” I reported. The intensity of Natalie Portman’s performance, the phantasmagoric approach, the great soundtrack by Mica Levi – I found it all quite overwhelming.
Directing Jackie, Larraín says, only made him “even more interested in discovering and revealing the intimate personalities of women who changed the face of the 20th century”. So here we have Spencer, a similarly compacted story about Princess Diana enduring a disastrous Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham, during which the Chilean director Larraín and his British scriptwriter Steven Knight (best known for Locke) imagine she took the brave decision to place her freedom and that of her children above the demands of king and country.
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