Review
UK – Optimum Releasing (no confirmed release date)
‘Expectations lead to disappointment,’ muses Abbie Cornish in Madonna’s W.E.. Expectations were certainly at their lowest at Sunday night’s gala screening in Leicester Square. The film has already been savaged by critics in Venice and Toronto, leading to a few chops and changes before its London debut. Perhaps lowering our expectations helped: the film isn’t quite the disaster it has been made out to be, although it really isn’t very good either. W.E. flitters along elegantly for its two-hour running time: stunningly beautiful yet entirely inconsequential.
W.E. attempts to parallel the lives of two women more than six decades apart. New Yorker Wally Winthrop (Cornish), peruses the Sotheby’s auction of the Windsor Estate in her effort to learn more about what she believes to be the ultimate love story – that of King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) and Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), an American divorcée for whom he relinquished the throne. Wally’s marriage crumbles and a new romance blossoms as she delves further and further into her fantasy of Wallis Simpson, eventually discovering that her story is not as perfect as she has imagined. We bounce back and forth through time as the film tries to link the two women, who aside from a shared name and a love for the finer things in life have little connection. However it’s the director’s massive name-recognition that sells W.E. and not its convoluted storyline.
Madonna is known for being a master of sound and image, and her reputation rings true for this, her second foray into directing after 2008′s Filth and Wisdom. W.E. both looks and sounds exquisite. Hagen Bogdanski’s cinematography is matched beautifully by Abel Korzeniowski’s soundtrack, outdoing the most glamorous perfume commercials or well-executed music videos (albeit with roughly the same level of storytelling). Madonna’s wealth of experience with music videos is put to good use and visually, at least, the film is flawless. The cinematic leaps from one period to another are beautiful – Wallis delicately traces the pattern on a tablecloth at Sotheby’s as the scene effortlessly fades to a maid smoothing the tablecloth as she prepares the Spencers’ dining table. The story isn’t as smooth and it’s impossible to tell why these two women should be linked. Occasionally, Wally and Wallis interact with one another through a series of encounters that come across as creepy delusions. An apparition of the now-late Wallis in Wally’s bathroom mirror is more suited to a low-budget horror than to a glossy love story.
Andrea Riseborough gives a standout performance as the plain-but-glamorous Wallis, but Cornish’s New York career woman (a seemingly superimposed version of Madonna herself) is the film’s low point. There’s absolutely no reason for us to feel compelled by her deteriorating marriage or her desperation for children. Her infatuation with Wallis, which is presented as a kind of cross-generational sisterhood, comes across as a fairly unhealthy celebrity obsession. She sees the couple as icons of love and their much-discussed Nazi leanings are quickly dismissed as mere ‘rumour’. This is merely a dreamy re-imagining of history through Wally’s (and by association Madonna’s) eyes.
Madonna could have crafted a fluffy but beautiful biopic of Wallis Simpson, a woman whom she so clearly feels is misunderstood. As it stands, W.E. meanders on aimlessly, evoking the familiar style-over-substance feeling of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. If W.E. is aiming to sell us the outfits, the jewellery and the trinkets, then we want them all; but ultimately it’s selling us a love story and we’re simply not that interested.
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