Andrea Riseborough and James D’Arcy star in ‘W.E.’
Other initials suggest themselves in response to “W.E.” How about “W.T.F.”? This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant,” several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby’s auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with “Family Feud.”
Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.
The movie sheds light on two inveterate intriguers: Wallis Simpson, the two-time divorcée whose romance with King Edward VIII caused him to abdicate the throne, and Madonna, the … well, Madonna.
Both of their stories are so well-stocked that it’s a shame Madonna, who directed and co-wrote the picture (with Alek Keshishian, who made the 1991 documentary about her, “Truth or Dare”) expends most of her time on a fictional character, Wally (an affecting Abbie Cornish), who was named after Simpson and is obsessed with her to the point of fondling her belongings at that auction in 1998 Manhattan. She’s a rich but unhappy trophy wife who rambles around an apartment the size of Madison Square Garden thinking about Simpson and trying to get pregnant via fertility drugs. Her hubby cheats on her and doesn’t want a kid, so she allows herself to be flirted with by a Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac) at Sotheby’s. Wally is a reverse Wallis — a plutocrat whose only chance at happiness might lie in marrying a commoner for love.
Superb as Cornish is, the character is such a stock figure, and her tale so sluggish and obvious, that she shouldn’t be in the film at all. Wallis Simpson (a flinty Andrea Riseborough), whose tale is intercut with Wally’s, was quite enough woman to make a movie about: A nobody from nowhere, she had neither great looks nor class but possessed an ironclad determination and an unerring fashion sense. Why ever would Madonna take an interest in her?
It’s the interplay of Wallis and Madonna that’s worth considering. As Madonna sees her, Wallis was a victim of male cruelty (she’s shown being kicked so fiercely in the stomach by her first husband that she miscarries, and is unable to get pregnant again) who simply saw an opportunity.
At a party attended by the future King Edward (James D’Arcy), known to intimates as “David,” she leaped, purring in anticipation. Her second husband, Ernest (David Harbour), sees what is happening, she sees him seeing, and yet she presses on, mixing up killer martinis, dancing with David, and breaking through to him with a nonstop line of clever patter. By acting as though she belonged where she didn’t, Wallis did several things Madonna would later do — made herself rich and famous and married a dashing Englishman. But even Madonna couldn’t scheme her way into the royal family.
“W.E.” (which interlocks with “The King’s Speech” — Bertie pops up in a couple of scenes here just as David appeared in that one) is very much a woman’s picture. The men, except the Sotheby’s security guard, mainly serve as obstacles or targets. That viewpoint is daring and kind of refreshing; a recent study noted that some two-thirds of the dialogue in Hollywood movies is spoken by men (in my experience, that is a reversal of reality).
In the Wallis portions, Madonna presents a frank, unashamed defense of gold-digging, though she does unconvincing penance for this in the Wally story, in which the bride proves lonely and bored in her Upper East Side castle.
After more than 40 years of feminism, the gold-digging subtext remains as central to female fantasy as it is in Jane Austen novels, and it’s implicit in most of those rom-coms in which, just by sheer coincidence, true love happens with the owner of a chain of bookstores, or the millionaire a gal meets while working the streets. If the woman virtuously chooses love over money, she gets the lucre anyway.
Wally (and Madonna) can’t stop fantasizing about Wallis because she went for the money and got the love anyway. She and David happily spent their lives together, and if this movie is to be believed, things were still sexy between them until his final hours.
Despite undercutting the message in the dullish Wally story, Madonna might as well be your grandma Edith, advising you that it’s just as easy to fall for a rich man as a poor one.