Starring: Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough, James D'Arcy, Oscar Isaac Director: Madonna Category: IIB (English, French and Russian) The title of Madonna's film alludes to the name of her central romantic couple, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and Edward VIII (James D'Arcy, above with Riseborough), the man who abdicated from the British throne to marry her. Remove the full-stops, however, and the second-time singer-turns-filmmaker's motive is clearer: W.E. is Madonna patting herself on the back, a former American spouse of a British celebrity (Guy Ritchie) celebrating her own resilience through a story of 'a foreigner who fell in love with a royal'. Such is Madonna's resolve to shape W.E. as a tragic, epic drama that ample resources were deployed to account for the exquisite sets, swooning cinematography and supposedly stirring lines about ill-fated love affairs. However, for all its pretence, W.E. is banal and bloodless and lacks the subversive oomph that characterises Madonna's otherwise calamitious directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom from 2008. The one subversive element in W.E. is perhaps Madonna and her screenwriter Alek Keshishian's attempt to reinvent the acerbic Wallis and the hedonistic Edward as the good guys in the story. The film attempts to portray the couple as devoted to each other as they are shunned, humiliated and cut off from the British royal family. In short, W.E. is at once a twin and a mirror image of The King's Speech, both are lushly-mounted period dramas toying with history in different ways. Obviously, Madonna desires to rehabilitate Wallis Simpson in the way Sofia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette. And the parallels emerge not only on an ideological level - that Wallis is trapped in a misery not of her making, but as a rich woman unfairly persecuted for her temperament and truthfulness towards what her heart desires - but also on an aesthetic level. Nicking one of the most audacious creative decisions in Coppola's film - with ragged-edge rock music backing a story set in the French imperial courts in the 18th century - Madonna has Wallis and Edward hitting the dancefloor in the 1930s to the blast of the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant. But the film that serves as W.E.'s template, however, is The Hours. Similar to the multi-tiered structure of that 2002 film - in which Virginia Woolf's life and work served as the inspiration for two characters in different historical eras - Wallis' experience is repeated in Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a modern-day New Yorker who gives up her career to become a trophy wife. Wally's marriage unravels just as she becomes increasingly obsessed with Wallis' life, and the film zips across time and between the two Ws as episodes of Wallis' life come to Wally as she spends time browsing through the Duchess of Windsor's artefacts that are about to go under the hammer at Sotheby's. The potential for poetry here is undermined by Madonna's heavy-handed approach to converging the two W's into a collective 'we', and subtlety is lost in the fantastical sequences when Wallis and Wally converse. Madonna clearly sees herself as an heir to Wallis, and Wally's presence here could be interpreted as that of a fan of hers. W.E., therefore, is a thinly-veiled exercise about a seasoned celebrity imparting advice to a confused stargazer: love reigns supreme is the message, and the gossip-mongerers be damned. In more impartial hands, such a film might have worked; laden with so much baggage, W.E. is bombastic to the point of being vacant. W.E. opens today
