Well, I just can’t. I can’t drop everything and check out Andrea Riseborough, luminous, fascinating, frighteningly talented movie star though she may be. Not that there’s much to check up on — two feature films seem to be about it so far, and neither one promises to be in the least like W./E, Madonna’s sumptuous tour of the Duchess of Windsor’s gilded cage. In the past six weeks or so, I’ve dropped everything twice, once for Jean Dujardin and once for Edward St Aubyn. The excitement has exhausted me.

Here’s what I took away from W./E., Windsor-wise. Wallis Warfield was a party girl; she knew as well anybody what a snazzy drinks party ought to be like for people who didn’t have to worry about respectability — or who didn’t think they did. She had a keen sense of a certain kind of fun, and was very good at clowning around without lapsing into gaucherie.

At a certain point in time and space, Wallis found herself in the orbit of an extraordinarily chic host, whose parties everyone wanted to attend because he brought to his natural position, that of the Prince of Wales, the up-to-date glamour of a film star, David Windsor. (And he was a film star; all you have to do is look at the newsreels.) Wallis wanted very much to go to David’s parties, and she eventually “swung” it. I think that she would have been happy with that — a permanent place on the prince’s, and then the king’s, private guest list. She would have been happy for a while, anyway.

But the prince fell in love with her, and his one sovereign act was to make her his own and keep her forever. Wallis hadn’t counted with that possibility.

Whether this account accords with “what really happened” between the eventual Duke and Duchess doesn’t really interest me. “What really happened” was presumably beyond the understanding of the parties themselves in the rush of event. Madonna tells a very plausible tale about a woman who was probably, like all the others in history (especially political history), not the witch that she was made out to be. The movie is unconcerned by political conundrums, such as whether David would have made a Good King. The film is not very interested in what David himself was like — a wise choice. I expect that Madonna’s title is intended to strike us with its alternative, E./W. Ew.

It will take a while to sort out how we feel about the Abbie Cornish story line, which concerns a modern-day New Yorker called Wally. (This part of the film is set in 1998, for interesting reasons.) I’m not going to go into that now, except to say that I have always liked Ms Cornish. She is a bit strapping for someone with an obsession with Wallis Simpson, but that’s probably intentional: you can’t be too petite to play the Duchess of Windsor. If the film wisely expects us to know the outlines of the Abdication Crisis, it is not nearly so tidy about Wally’s romantic life. But Oscar Isaac and Richard Coyle are engaging costars for Abbie Cornish, and I expect that a second viewing, with the mystification out of the way, will make it easier to judge Madonna’s achievement.

For the moment, I counsel anyone who can’t make up his or her mind about W./E. to fix on one great moment, a performance that merits showering Andrea Riseborough with every known award, including the Garter. In an episode labeled “1972,” Wallis asks the dying David if he would like her to read to him. He pulls down his oxygen mask and asks her to dance. So she does: she does the Twist. She does the Twist the way fiercely fun-seeking glamour girls of the middle of the last century did the Twist, with the economy and verve of Margot Fonteyn. The scene could not be more Vogue-ready if Diana Vreeland had conceived, shot, and danced it herself.

And yet it is also an utterly timeless dance, as hieratically erotic as anything that Cleopatra did for Caesar. Commanding a woman to dance for you has been one of the hallmarks of the powerful male since powerful males were introduced. Beneath the black-helmeted carapace of her unflagging toilette, Andrea Riseborough’s Wallis packs millennia of female professionalism and distaste. She even manages to enjoy herself: she knows exactly how to decorate her twisting paisley top with glittering sequins of ridicule. She is like a Tosca who doesn’t need to kill the man before whom the world, would you believe it, trembled. I’ll be damned if this doesn’t go down as one of the most notable clips in cinema history.

***

As we sat at our table at Veselka yesterday, I couldn’t stop asking myself why we didn’t do this more often, Will and I. He took his seat without a booster and behaved very, very well, considering that he is only two! I must insist that he behaved very well by anybody’s standards. True, he treated the flatware as percussion instruments for a while, but he wasn’t very noisy and he seemed to be well aware that knives and forks can hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doing. True, he refused all but the tiniest morsels of the grilled cheese sandwich, preferring to eat my frites. He was on his feet for a short time, while we waited for another order of French fries, but he didn’t bother other customers or get in the waitstaff’s way. More objective witnesses might have made a different evaluation of his behavior, but I thought that Will was an angel, and I wondered why we didn’t do this more often.

First, Will is usually at day care, or, as I call it, “in school.” School is closed this week for some reason, and alternative arrangements needed tweaking at the last minute; I was only too happy to step in, especially after Tuesday’s terrors. The second reason why we don’t “do this more often” is that Will has only recently returned from a spell of refusing to sit at table. Intoxicated by ever-widening capacities for running, jumping, scrambling, climbing, and discovering what he can and cannot squeeze himself in to, Will was not disposed, for several months, to sit still when eating. Eating itself did not interest him much. Kathleen and I would gaze wistfully at the “Mr Dinner Party” picture of him at eight months, when he would happily spend an hour in his little seat, clipped on to the table, and eat just about everything (especially buttered rolls). We would shake our heads at the passing of time: Will had certainly outgrown his Mr Dinner Party days. It would take our breath away: how could the autumn of 2010 seem so distant?  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 at 8:11 am.