During the 1991 Christmas holiday, Kristen Stewart’s embattled Princess Diana arrives at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate to be subjected to holiday festivities with the royal family. I sincerely want to like Stewart as an actress. I think she makes some interesting choices in her roles, but every single time her quirks come out (her constant head tilt, hunched shoulders, and way of spitting out her lines) that all I see is her instead of the character she’s playing. In stills of this film, she looks so much like Diana that I thought it wouldn’t be the case here, but once she started moving that changed. I eventually just started thinking of it as Princess Diana’s inner angst represented by Kristen Stewart, similar to Keegan Michael Key’s Luther for Barack Obama, and I was able to appreciate the film much more for it. Though I’ll never be able to really understand the difficulties in such a life for someone who was groomed for it, the film does capture her struggles even if sometimes through an indelicate hand.
Oscar Nomination: Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role