W.E. (2011)
Directed by Madonna
In 1998, an auction of the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor causes great excitement. For one woman, Wally Winthrop, it has much more meaning. Wally becomes obsessed by their historic love story. As she learns more about the sacrifices involved, Wally gains her own courage to find happiness.
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5 films that influenced W.E.
What critics say influenced W.E.
The existentialistic undercurrent between Wallis and Wally, for instance, obviously draws broad parallels to the characters at the center of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” a movie she admits to being inspired by (less obvious, perhaps, are the more ambivalent nods to Robert Altman’s “3 Women”).
If you saw Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech" you're likely to remember Wallis Simpson as the woman who essentially sabotaged the reign of Colin Firth's older brother.
The story told is a flip side of and prequel of sorts to "The King's Speech," which was about how Edward's brother George assumed the throne when Edward, played here by James D'Arcy, abdicated to marry Simpson, played by Andrea Riseborough.
The director tells the Duchess’ story with surprising verve, historical accuracy and style, a huge improvement over the nastily cartoonish way the couple was represented in the overrated The King’s Speech last year.
(Bonny Prince Bertie of “The King’s Speech’’ puts in a cameo appearance, played by Laurence Fox and stuttering away so we know it’s him; the actor’s father, James, plays George V in a brief cameo.)
Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!" is being positioned as the "spiritual sequel" to "Dazed and Confused," the director's exuberant 1993 ode to high school life in the 1970s.
The closest thing she comes to the kind of bold flourish that one might expect is a strange sequence in which Edward and Wallis goose up a dull party with hits of speed for everyone and get them dancing to, of all things, the classic Sex Pistols tune "Pretty Vacant" and that merely comes across as a wan approximation of what Sofia Coppola did in the infinitely superior "Marie Antoinette."
At one point, Edward doses some sleepy socialites with pep pills, and they dance to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," but except for that rip-off of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," Madge is a slow-footed director — and a wrongheaded writer who forgets to make us care about the characters.
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With a script credited to Madonna and her "Truth or Dare" director, Alek Kekishian, "W.E." jumps back and forth between distant but connected romantic entanglements, in the manner of the pair of literary adaptations that seem to have been the film's models, "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981) and "Possession" (2002).