this is how to destroy a film, in print
W.E.
Dir: Madonna; Starring: Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough, James D’Arcy.
15 cert, 119 min
Madonna has been touring her biopic of Wallis Simpson around film festivals since last September, when it was received in Venice about as warmly as a six-foot rise in sea levels. The film has since been back in the cutting room, but like the Terminator T-1000 robot striding away from an exploding truck, its awfulness has emerged almost entirely unscathed.
W.E. tells the stories of two women: the notorious royal mistress Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and an unhappy present-day Manhattan socialite called Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish). The screenplay, written by Madonna with what can only be described as not enough help from the filmmaker Alek Keshishian, thwocks back and forth between them like a wonky shuttlerooster.
Wally is obsessed with her near-namesake, and escapes her loveless, sexless marriage by loitering around an auction house which is about to hold a sale of Mrs Simpson’s personal effects. Here, she befriends Evgeni (Oscar Issac), a catwalk-handsome Russian security guard who also happens to be a writer, intellectual and gifted pianist.
Between the scenes of Wally ogling Wallis’s riches and resenting her infertile, unfaithful, abusive and possibly homosexual husband, Madonna shows us the ups and downs of Wallis’s relationship with Edward VIII (James D’Arcy). As both women discover the meaning and cost of true love, they psychically comfort one another across time and space, and also swap style tips.
Madonna’s skill with the camera seems to extend to her being able to turn it on, but not a great deal further: to liven up an argument between Wallis and Edward, she has her romantic leads inexplicably run around a tree trunk. Later, we see Wallis dancing the Charleston with an African tribeswoman to the strains of 'Pretty Vacant’ by The Sex Pistols in front of a Charlie Chaplin film, which must be a strong contender for the most garbled, half-baked image in cinema history.
W.E. is — still — a stultifyingly vapid film, festooned with moments of pure aesthetic idiocy. With characteristic humbleness, Madonna performs a song called 'Masterpiece’ over the end credits, although one can’t help but feel that her 2003 number one single 'Sorry’ might have been more appropriate.