W.E. (Friday, February 3, 2012) (7)

I worked in international auction houses for 12 years of my life, including at Sotheby's, where in 1998 they held the sale of the property from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Though I was not there at that exact time, I worked with dozens of people who spoke about how amazing the lines were to get into the exhibition and how ridiculous the crowds were to see all their tchockes. I also saw other big and silly exhibitions of crap from famous people and how people went nuts for them. I can promise you that Madonna has no such insight into such things and thinks such auction are romantic and wonderful. They're not. They're sad and boring.

But the framing device for her film W.E. is the 1998 auction, where Mohamed Al-Fayed sold all sorts of stuff owned by Edward and Wallis, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Into this auction exhibition dives Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a bored Upper East Side housewife who was named after the Duchess and now lives with her ex-pat English shrink husband on Park Avenue. She feels some connection to her namesake, although we don't totally know what it is, aside from "something womanly" and ersatz feminist.

We are thrown back and forth between Wally's World and the lives and romance between Wallis (Andrea Riseborough) and Edward (James D'Arcy... that's Mr. D'Arcy to you, ladies). We see how she had a rough first marriage to an American soldier who beat her, how she was married to another American businessman who moved them to London and how they met as she was climbing up the social ladder of London (and being a rather loose woman along the way). Madonna presents Wallis as a self-confident and smart woman, but also strangely as a foxy one totally aware of what she was doing the whole time.

The royal story is a bit dull, if fairy-tale-romantic, so we spend lots of time in the '90s with Wally, whose husband is a dick and who can't figure out how to pass her time. She ends up going to the Windsor auction exhibition a few dozen times and spending hours there. I can speak from personal experience that this is all but impossible as auction exhibitions are some of the most boring places on Earth.

While spending her time there, she meets Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a security guard who is also supposedly a Russian immigrant, though he looks more like Guatemalan... because the actor is... Guatemalan (and because Madonna has a thing for Latin dudes). Somehow the Upper East Side princess falls for this blue-collar dude from Bushwick... because that could happen (that has never happened in the quarter-millennium of auction house history, despite years of security-guard efforts).

This all sounds like a terrible narrative with two unconnected stories? Well, that's about right. This is a totally stupid plot with two ridiculously unrelated threads that shouldn't and don't really meet at any point. I guess there's an idea that Wally is sad that her marriage is not all she hoped it would be and she takes solace in the idea that her namesake was also in such a marriage until she got a divorce and married up... but that's such a banal and superficial link.

Madonna's directing style is so turgid and blunt it ceases to be art and moves into baseball-bat-over-the-head-territory. Do I care that Wally had some sort of fake career at Sotheby's before she got married to her foreign beau? Does that make her more likable? No. It makes her exactly the kind of woman who would get herself into the dumb marriage that she's in and exactly the remote personality that makes for great and terrible melodrama, but totally urelateable.

This could have been a nice historical romance, but the contemporary story feels more like a gilded lily than any sort of necessary frame. I think Madonna has it in her to be a good filmmaker, but she needs to learn when enough is enough and not the entire history of everything in the world (including a bunch of lame excuses for why Wallis and Edward weren't really Nazi lovers). I think a good editor would have done this script and this film a good service. But I guess that would have been less romantic, or something.

Stars: 1.5 of 4