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.