You may remember the pair as bit players in "The King's Speech," a movie that sketched Edward as a fatuous playboy eager to shuck the dreary bonds of duty to drink martinis poured by a social-climbing Yankee trollop.
You may also remember some of the attendant press, which mentioned that Edward, as king, wasn't as tough on the Nazis as he might have been - after abdication, Edward shook hands with a grinning Adolf Hitler on a Third Reich honeymoon with Simpson.
"Third Reich Honeymoon" is not a title that Madonna considered. In fact, there's a lot of clumsy exposition in "W.E." inserted to explain it all away. Wallis moans that Edward's notorious Hitler handshake spawned "rumor" and "innuendo" about Nazi sympathies.
I'm shocked that media-savvy Madonna would make such a blunder. You cannot build a character on "I Am Not a Nazi Sympathizer." It's always poor salesmanship.
Certainly it gets in the way of what Madonna argues is the greatest love story of the century. Or second-greatest, next to the one between Madonna and herself.
Her portrait of Simpson, forty-something media-magnet divorcée and hard-nosed American gal, sounds like someone else we know.
Edward to Simpson: "Are all American girls such good dancers?"
Later, Simpson describes herself as a woman of modest gifts who manufactured ways to capture attention: "The only thing I could do was dress better than anyone else."
Spoken like a woman who wore an Egyptian headdress to the Super Bowl.
Her theme in "W.E." is that Simpson, not Edward, made the great sacrifice. She gave up her second marriage, her "freedom" and her "privacy" to marry Edward, and in doing so bravely agreed to be known as history's most notorious home-wrecker (the home being the House of Windsor).
