Sunday, May 20, 2012

W.E.

W.E. - Dir. Madonna (2011)


"I have never known one person so utterly possessed by another as he was by her."

Madonna has made an indelible mark on pop culture as one of the most successful pop singers of all time. Yet, she was never able to achieve the same success in the film industry, despite her larger-than-life stage persona. Though she appeared in hit films like Dick Tracy and A League of Their Own, Madonna will be inexorably linked to critically derided flops like Body of Evidence and Swept Away, directed by her then-husband Guy Ritchie. With acting not panning out, Madonna decided to try her luck behind the camera and made her directorial debut with 2008's Filth and Wisdom. A dark comedy set in a world of S&M, strip clubs, and drug addicts; it also received poor reviews from the critics.

After going for seedy and shocking, Madonna tries to court the highbrow arthouse audience with her sophomore effort, W.E. The film is based on the controversial love affair between King Edward VIII and a twice-divorced American named Wallis Simpson. Their relationship was glimpsed partly in The King's Speech as Edward abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis, much to the dismay of the royal family and an entire country. The couple was also dogged by rumors of being Nazi sympathizers after visiting Hitler in 1937. Madonna herself had been fascinated by their story for years, relating how the very mention of their name at a soiree was like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room.

Rather than tell a straight biopic about Wallis Simpson, Madonna relates her story through the struggles of a young socialite in 1998. Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) seems to have a life little girls dream about. She's married to a successful doctor and lives in a ritzy apartment in Manhattan. Yet, Wally is unsuccessful in her attempts to get pregnant. Even worse, her husband, William (Richard Coyle), no longer desires to have children and becomes physically and mentally abusive. Wally becomes obsessed with her namesake when a collection of personal items belonging to Edward and Wallis are put up for auction at Sotheby's. There, Wally becomes friends with a Russian security guard named Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), who happens to be the sensitive type that plays Rachmaninoff on the piano. Madonna intercuts Wally's plights with those of Wallis (Andrea Riseborough), who suffered abuse at the hands of her first husband before leaving her second husband for Edward (James D'Arcy). Despite the love they share, the royal family refuses to accept Wallis.

It's clear why Madonna chose to tell the story of Wallis and Edward from the point-of-view of Wallis. Both women have seen their marriages become tabloid fodder and both have spent their lives fending off paparazzi and unwanted publicity. However, the screenplay by Madonna and Alek Keshishian, the director of her hit documentary Truth or Dare, lacks any sort of subtlety as evidenced by an opening sequence where a naked and pregnant Wallis is brutally beaten on a bathroom floor and left in a pool of blood. Worse yet, it's exceedingly dull with an endless stream of mopey melodrama. Then, W.E. gets downright laughable when the heroines cross space and time to share furtive glances and fortune cookie platitudes. Another sequence sees a dour party thrown by the controversial couple turned into a drug fueled rave as the dapper denizens trip out on Benzedrine. The anachronistic "Pretty Vacant" by the Sex Pistols plays over the sequence, which seems to contradict Madonna's hypothesis that Wallis was a woman of unsung substance.

When the film isn't muddled by Madonna's messy direction, it actually looks pretty good thanks to the production design by Martin Childs (Shakespeare in Love) and the costumes by Arianne Phillips (A Single Man), both of whom are Oscar winners. Andrea Riseborough makes a fine accounting for herself in the role of Wallis Simpson. Strong and opinionated, it's easy to see why someone might give up an empire for her. Too bad she wasn't given better material to work with. It's also a shame that none of the other actors give any sort of a memorable performance. Abbie Cornish, James D'Arcy, and Oscar Isaac are all bland while the father-son duo of James and Laurence Fox (who play King George V and the stuttering Bertie) deserved more screen time.

Madonna may have left her mark in the music industry, but she has yet to make an admirable impression in her nascent career as a director. W.E. is plagued by questionable editing, unsightly scene composition, and a script that is a downright bore.

Rating: * (*****)

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