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W. E. Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for some domestic violence, nudity, and language) Genre: Drama, Romance Theater release: January 20, 2012 by Weinstein Company Directed by: Madonna Runtime: 1 hour 59 minutes Cast: Abbie Cornish (Wally Winthrop), James D'Arcy (Edward), Andrea Riseborough (Wallis Simpson), Oscar Isaac (Evgeni), Richard Coyle (William Winthrop) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

W. E. retells the love story of King Edward VIII of England and Mrs. Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced commoner from Baltimore, Maryland, for whom Edward renounced his throne. In his abdication speech, on Dec. 11, 1936, he said, "I have found it impossible … to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love," fluttering womanly hearts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Without a doubt, this is a beautiful movie, directed and co-written by Madonna (yes, that Madonna). There's an old saw about a Broadway musical so lavish that "you walk out humming the sets"; with W.E., you walk out humming the costumes. The dressing and accessorizing is so exquisite and eye-pleasing, in fact, that the movie was nominated for an Oscar in costume design. Impressive visuals don't end there; the lighting and camerawork are entrancing throughout, and we're provided with a feast for the eyes in elegant homes and landscapes. The choice of Andrea Riseborough to portray Wallis Simpson was wise, and restrained; she doesn't appear as a conventional beauty, but as a plain woman who compensates by dressing with great style. She can't fill a dress, being rather more bony than shapely, but she can bring a dress to life, and capture every eye.

Andrea Riseborough as Wallis, James D'Arcy as Edward

This story has been told many times before, both in film and books, and Wallis and Edward are regularly portrayed with feet of clay. Whatever her other merits, Wallis was perhaps an opportunist, an expert manipulator, and it seems widely agreed that Edward was "besotted" with her. They inhabited a world of wealth and social status, but one dedicated to endless pleasure rather than duty or responsibility. Both had already been through multiple affairs, Edward having a particular weakness for married women.

You can't read much about Edward without forming the impression that he sounds like a twit. He couldn't understand why it was inappropriate to socialize with Nazis. When King George V died in January 1936, Edward, already involved with Simpson, couldn't see why it was inappropriate to listen to the next-day announcement of his accession with his still-married mistress by his side. He didn't care that the Australian delegation disapproved of his marrying Wallis, because there are "not many people in Australia." He had the royal coin struck with his profile facing left, not right as tradition preferred, because he wanted to show the part in his hair.

Abbie Cornish as Wally Winthrop

Edward's private secretary conjectured that "for some hereditary or physiological reason, his normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence." If you enjoyed last year's The King's Speech, about his brother Bertie, King George VI, overcoming a speech impediment, you'll recall an unflattering depiction of Edward and Wallis. Their father, King George V, prayed that the succession would skip over Edward and pass directly to brother Bertie.

So there are tensions and temptations within the Edward-and-Wallis story which make it promising material for movie exploration. But, unfortunately, that story is only one layer of this movie, and it is a jumbled and fractured layer. The film tries to tell the 1930s story through a more contemporary lens. Covering it like chocolate on a truffle is a story set in 1998, in which an unhappily married woman, Wally Winthrop (her mother and grandmother were "obsessed with" Wallis Simpson, she says), keeps returning to Sotheby's to linger over a display of Wallis and Edward's personal property, in the days before it is auctioned. The movie's linear story follows Wally, and we keep dipping into Wallis's life at various points in time.

Oscar Isaac as Evgeni

Unfortunately, the Wally story is completely banal. She has a bad, bad, cheating-and-beating, high-society husband, and meets at Sotheby's a sympathetic, manly security guard named Evgeni ("a Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard," we're told, in one of many flashes of overly-obvious exposition). There is no element of the Wally-and-Evgeni story that would surprise you. It comes straight out of the can. The Wallis-and-Edward story is the one with intriguing dark corners, the one we'd like to know better. But the film gives us only chopped-up fragments of that story, presented with little subtlety. Here, Wallis is a wholly sympathetic character, and Edward has been rehabilitated into a hero for our time. Contemporary news reports hail him as the "popular King Edward" and "the strong-minded prince," and Wally tells us the evidence for Nazi friendships is "gossip."

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