W.E.

One positive thing to be said about Madonna’s new movie,
W.E., is that it is leagues better than her first
directing effort, the 2008 Filth and Wisdom. But then many
things are, periodontal surgery among them. Unlike that earlier
film, this one is beautifully photographed (by Hagen Bogdanski, who
also shot The Lives of Others), and so the endlessly
shuttling Grand Tour locations—London, Paris, Cannes—glide by in
preening detail, and the deluxe interiors speak softly of serious
money.

That’s the good part. The picture’s problem—well,
one of its problems—is that it presents for our appreciative
contemplation two of the most worthless jet-setting parasites of
the last century: Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Wallis Simpson, the
American clothes-horse divorcee for whom he abdicated the Throne of
England. In 1937, directly after stepping down, Edward married his
brittle inamorata, and together they spent the next 35 years doing
absolutely nothing but spending epic amounts of his hand-me-down
royal fortune in the gaudiest possible ways. Having no other
purpose, they became style icons among the international idle
rich—he in his tailored tweeds, she in pricey Dior and Vionnet and
the emeralds and pearls with which he continually showered her.
Unsurprisingly, Madonna excavates this aspect of her subjects with
gusto.

To focus on fashion in depicting a couple who once had dinner
with Hitler, and are widely attested to have maintained a chummy
relationship with the Nazis well into the war, is an appalling
decision. (Madonna’s take on this is: Hey, lots of people had
dinner with Hitler—and indeed we can picture the Führer in his
Berghof, sitting down with Goebbels and Göring for a hearty
Bavarian repast.) She also attempts to present Edward as a man of
conscience—a man of the people, even. (At one point we see him
rousing a crowd of miserable jobless Welshmen with a cry of
“Something must be done!”) These feeble rehabilitative strategies
are too unpersuasive to maintain, however.

Apart from the gaping vacancy at the center of the film, Madonna
chose, for some reason, to write the script with Alek Keshishian,
heretofore best-known for directing her 1991 tour documentary,
Truth or Dare. The result is a garble of scattershot
incidents strewn with clots of overripe dialogue. In one scene, set
in a drafty mansion, Wallis (played by Andrea Riseborough in the
movie’s only lively performance) tells Edward (James D’Arcy) that
she’s cold; his reply: “Maybe you need someone to keep you warm.”
Later, when Edward tells Wallis that he has decided to quit the
monarchy in order to marry her, her prescient response is, “I will
be the most despised woman in the world.”

Even more debilitating is the movie’s structure, which defies
sustained comprehension. Madonna cuts back and forth between the
duke and his consort as they go about their trivial lives—from the
1930s into the early ’70s—and a separate story, set in New York in
1998, in which a fictitious young woman named Wally (Abbie
Cornish), obsessed with her deceased namesake, moons around among a
display of the Windsors’ possessions, which are being offered up
for auction at Sotheby’s. Like Wallis, in one of her earlier
marriages, Wally is burdened with an abusive husband; and like
Wallis, she yearns for true love. That she eventually finds it in
the arms of a lowly Ukrainian security guard (Oscar Isaac) who
plays classical piano in his shabby loft is a conceit ridiculous
beyond the call of implausibility.  

There are moments in this movie of such honking absurdity that
one can only slump in wonder. A decadent party scene, for instance,
presumably set in the 1960s, in which the wealthy revelers writhe
about to the strains of the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant.” And a
later scene in which Edward, on his deathbed, asks the similarly
elderly Wallis to dance for him, and she totters over to a record
player and cranks up the Chubby Checker version of “The Twist”—and
then proceeds to actually do the dance, for rather longer than any
other director might feel it wise to show. Of a special silliness
are the moments when Wally and Wallis somehow interpenetrate their
separate eras to spend time together – sitting side by side on a
park bench, encountering each other on a Paris street (“Get a
life!” Wallis hisses). Our amazement is unending.

A lot of time and effort has gone into the making of this movie,
particularly in the areas of art direction and costume design. But
the purportedly grand love story of Wallis and Edward is a puny
thing in the context of their deplorable lives. The actors here are
ill-served, the sometimes impressive visual textures are
squandered, and a bout of desperate reediting following the movie’s
disastrous premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival has been in
vain. W.E. remains at the end what it was at the beginning
and continues to be throughout: a flamboyantly misconceived
mess.

Chronicle

With Chronicle, the shaky-cam “real footage” movie, on
the cusp of propelling some viewers into face-clawing lamentation,
finally grows up. The picture has a rousing spirit and an
unexpected emotional warmth. It features good (if little-known)
actors, a solid genre plot, and surprisingly slick effects that are
especially impressive for being so seamlessly woven into the film’s
low-budget look. The movie hustles by in less than 90 minutes, and
it’s a lot of fun. 

The story, by director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max
Landis—both feature-film first-timers—is a clever riff on the
superhero theme. Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan, a True Blood
alumnus) is the kid with the video cam—a lonely nerd documenting
his miserable homelife with an abusive father (Michael Kelly) and
bedridden, dying mother (Bo Petersen). Andrew is a high-school
senior, shunned by the cool kids and tormented by the usual crew of
varsity troglodytes—all the more so after he starts bringing his
new camera to school. His only semi-friends are his amiable cousin
Matt (Alex Russell) and, for reasons unclear, the gleamingly
popular Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan, of Friday Night
Lights).

One day, out in the woods, these three happen across a large
hole that leads deep underground. Descending into it, they find
something very strange, and soon after clambering back up to the
surface discover that they’ve suddenly developed nifty new
telekinetic powers. At first they use this gift for fun and
pranks—floating little Lego bricks up into the air, baffling car
owners by shuffling their vehicles around in parking lots. Then,
with continued practice, they discover that they can rise up into
the air themselves, and soon they’re swooping around through the
clouds.

As an early reference to Schopenhauer (!) suggests, such
lighthearted enjoyment can’t last. Andrew is a young man gnawed by
teen trauma, and his hunger for payback—now entirely
possible—festers darkly. He starts small—levitating a spider and
then pulling it apart in midair with his mind (a striking
effect)—but quickly moves on, dispensing rough justice to highway
tailgaters and settling scores with his loudmouth dad. As his taste
for mayhem mounts, we marvel that some of the film’s elaborate
havoc could be covered by its reported $15-million budget.

The basic challenge in pulling off a movie like this is camera
POV. Here, an antidote for hand-held visual monotony is built into
the concept: among the many things Andrew can levitate is his
vidcam, thus enabling plausible overhead shots and traveling side
views. And the introduction of a pretty blonde video blogger named
Casey (Ashley Hinshaw) allows for the recording of scenes in which
Andrew plays no part. You still wonder how feasible it would be to
descend a crowded school staircase with your eyes glued to a
viewfinder (and at the end you wonder how all the footage we’re
seeing was somehow assembled), but genre fans will accept that you
have to roll with this sort of thing. At its conclusion, the
picture leaves open the possibility of a sequel—on the evidence of
this film, possibly a not-bad idea.

The Woman in Black