Kristen, Kirsten, and Patient Work
Image by Fergus Campbell
Last Tuesday, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst, 20 and 30 years into their acting careers, respectively, were nominated for their first Oscars. Such delayed recognition is not without precedent (see Richard E. Grant’s 2019 nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?) but it’s uncommon, especially for female actors, on whom the Motion Picture Academy often bestows honors for breakout turns. That Dunst and Stewart’s nominations came for performances considered career highlights, even peaks, speaks as much to the unpredictable and meandering patterns of each’s filmography as to the constancy and fluency with which both have acted too strangely for the Academy.
The mainstream bent to Stewart and Dunst’s early work belies a unifying performative quality: un-effusive and unfazed melancholy. Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson (the first character I saw her play) disarmed with the simplicity of her smirks and sighs; she was low-energy without being effortless, tired without being worn out. In that iconographically burdened space of the high school cafeteria, I watched either MJ casting off popular-girl ghosts or Dunst doing the same thing.
Stewart, whose own franchise experienced more rabid attention than Spider-Man, generated a star that often overshadowed her role. Stewart’s relationship with Robert Pattinson, her Twilight co-star, dominated young fans’ emotional lives, and when Stewart confessed an affair with the married director of a new film, it became clear she could drum up intrigue nearly as fervent as that directed toward Brad or Angelina.
Critics have pegged Stewart’s familiarity with the prying camera as crucial to her embodiment of Princess Diana, an assessment that fits a popular narrative of conclusiveness—the role finally matching all the actor’s inclinations—which has followed Dunst and Stewart’s awards campaigns. Both got spotlights in The New Yorker (Stewart’s was a profile), which noted, for Dunst, a “career slump” in the late 2000s; Stewart more consciously pivoted to international cinema, working with directors like Oliver Assayas. (She won a César Award for Personal Shopper: an alternate-reality professional fate or French adaptation of an American future.) Dunst shone on television, and then she and Stewart scored parts in features more directly aligned with Oscar tastes than any they’d so far headlined.
I have often been bothered by Stewart’s acting, the sensitivity of which tends to draw attention to itself. She rolls her eyes and grimaces and gulps—these are jarring movements meant to convey smaller inner conflicts, and with some scripts the effect is pretentious. If, however, you can read in Stewart’s characters an uncommon awareness—of surroundings, of people watching her—then the mannerisms turn visceral, and you realize what Stewart can do to render pain and discomfort.
Diana does really seem a perfect match for Stewart, beyond any part of their overlapping personal histories, because Diana, at least as she has been mythologized in pop culture, possessed that sense of awareness, extraordinarily magnified. The opening scene of Spencer, which director Pablo Larrain fashions more as a series of nightmares than a proper narrative, finds Diana at a rural cafe proclaiming to diners that she has “absolutely no idea” where she is. Her solitude and sports car are easy indicators of detachment from the royal establishment, but Stewart moves and ducks her gaze in ways that scramble the balance of self-imposition, secret delight, and hopelessness in Diana’s isolation—ways that demand some kind of spectatorship.
Stewart’s assumption of Diana’s traits is not over-exacting or unsettling, like pretty much every awards-bait transformation, but she leverages a new (pretty good) accent and a borrowed visual identity to elevate a constant performative style; she can dial it up and radiate tension, as in the fridge scene with Timothy Spall’s pesky watchman, or turn it into a whisper, as during the midnight game Diana plays with William and Harry. Here, Stewart whisks despair into fantasy. Diana wants peace of mind for the boys, this smallest of audiences, but she also wants them on her side. There’s no way she won’t get both.
Dunst deserves the range that Stewart has in Spencer. She’s been granted it before—The Power of the Dog arrives years after arthouse showcases like Melancholia. Jane Campion’s film received the most Oscar nominations of any 2022 contender, which reflects its crowded acting roster, and maybe also Campion’s fastidious palette. The Montana landscape and Dunst’s performance match in almost the wrong way, at least if you want to see Dunst clearly (this is true for Jesse Plemons too). She’s mellow and then murky—her biggest opportunity for cathartic release hinges on intoxication—and then she blends into the background.
Perhaps the internationalization of the Academy has hastened Stewart’s nomination; voters might be okay with a portrayal of a public figure that deepens a mythology instead of giving a (dependably false) impression of real and revealing information. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette did the former, with a rock score and contemporary dialogue and a piercing desire to reach the soul of some kind of young and misunderstood woman of privilege, whether or not she resembled the queen whose name she shared.
Viewers always warm to Coppola’s films too late; Marie Antoinette’s Cannes opening was infamously met with many boos. But it’s this film that transposes Dunst’s presence as boldly as is true for Stewart in Spencer. The sadness that runs through Antoinette’s handling of her resources and position never fully undermines the genuine fun she has. Dunst won’t allow you to know for sure which fate she’s accepted, which moments she is throwing away or absorbing completely. Now that Dunst has some Academy-vetted appeal, appeal she hasn’t courted or compromised for, maybe we’ll get a miniseries.
Fergus Campbell is a a Culture writer and senior at Columbia College.
