Madonna’s Academy Award nominated film (2011 Best Achievement in Costume Design, Arianne Phillips) delivers an elegantly stylish and beautifully dramatic look into the lives of two fragile yet passionate women intertwined across the decades. In 1998, New Yorker Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) becomes enamored with what is believed to be the greatest romance of the 20th century – King Edward VIII’s (James D’Arcy) surrender of the crown for the woman he loved, the chic and charismatic American, Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough). Through a series of secret letters, Wally discovers the lifetime of romance Edward and Wallis shared together.
It was a love story that amazed and scandalized the world: because royal protocol barred him marrying a divorced commoner (and an American, to boot), Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936 in order to be with "the woman I love." That story is brought to the screen in W./E., along with a parallel 1990's tale of a woman (Abbie Cornish, Bright Star) fascinated by the saga as she moons about the halls of Sotheby's in anticipation of an auction of the royals' stuff. This is the project dreamed up by Madonna for her narrative-feature directing debut, and you can presume that Madonna identifies with the lives of the royals, living their dramas out in a fishbowl for all the world to see. But at least his American lady, Wallis Simpson, is embodied in lively fashion by Andrea Riseborough (from Brighton Rock), who is fully convincing as a subject of fascination.
