Starring Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough. Written by Madonna, Alex Keshishian. Directed by Madonna. 119 min. Opens Feb. 3.
With its ever-swirling camera, plush period decor, oversized performances, purple-prose dialogue and delirium-inducing montages, there’s not a second of restraint in W.E., Madonna’s second attempt to establish her credentials as a filmmaker. Whereas Madonna’s 2008 feature debut, Filth and Wisdom, boasted a grubbiness that was almost endearing, this period drama about the love affair that cost King Edward VIII his throne aims to be the kind of cultured fare that wins statuettes and does steady business with the Downton Abbey demographic. The fact that W.E. earned only one Oscar nomination (for Best Costume Design) suggests that Madonna and her benefactor, Harvey Weinstein, have failed in their mission. (They can’t have been happy about the poisonous reviews and dreadful box office returns in the U.K., either.)
That said, few cinematic catastrophes ever achieve the thoroughly wrong-headed majesty that W.E. does in nearly every scene. Flipping between a pair of timelines with whiplash-inducing velocity, the film connects the lives of two women. One is Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the brash American divorcee and socialite who becomes the most notorious woman of her age after she and King Edward (James D’Arcy) make their love public. The other is Wally (Abbie Cornish), a New Yorker who becomes obsessed with an exhibition on these royals as a means to escape her own unhappy marriage to what must be America’s meanest pediatrician.
The movie has flown off the rails well before the stupefying scene in which Wallis and His Majesty host a wild, Benzedrine-fuelled party anachronistically scored to the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant,” an idea that Madonna lifted from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Secondhand as they may often be, such bold gestures would inspire more admiration if not for Madonna’s strenuous efforts to rehabilitate her subjects’ largely deserved reputations as Nazi-sympathizing upper-class twits. But while W.E. might be mad as a March hare on a meth bender, at least it’s never dull, which is something you can’t say about many of the nine movies currently vying for the award for which Madge has been so cruelly denied.
