Madonna's "W.E." With Andrea Riseborough and Abbie Cornish First there was "Julie & Julia," Nora Ephron's demi-dessert about Julia Child and the wildly less interesting blogger who toiled and troubled her way through one of Child's cookbooks. More recently there was "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," another bifurcated movie about women in separate epochs, one a past in which women are imprisoned by law and broken feet, the other a present in which they're burdened by ennui and high heels. Now there's Wally & Wallis, or rather "W.E.," Madonna's fiction film about Wallis Simpson and an old-fashioned-minded modern miss who yearns to wear the duchess's kid gloves, smell her perfume and luxuriate in her kind of love. Nostalgia has always been part of the romantic fiction racket, but it's hard to know what to make of this mini-trend. Does such cinematic communing with past female lives trace back to "The Hours," the Stephen Daldry movie based on the Michael Cunningham novel? In both that book and its film adaptation, Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" serves as the pivot for three women (Woolf included) from three eras whose lives, over the course of a day, unfold in something like transcendent synchronicity. Whatever you think of the novel and specifically the film, the stakes - sexuality and identity, life and death, creation and being - are high for all three women. Very little feels at stake in "W.E.," which involves the intersection of two lives, that of Mrs. Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), who married the Duke of Windsor, and a contemporary haute-bourgeois New York hausfrau, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish). The story is as simple as its telling is tortuous: Wally, unhappily married to a hotshot doctor, William (Richard Coyle), has developed a fixation with Wallis Simpson. Wally's story takes place, oddly, in 1998, though the combination of her deluxe digs and her stiff-lipped anguish within its wood-paneled walls - she's an exotic bird fluttering in her gold cage - is straight out of one of Lana Turner's desperate melodramas. Sidelined by the apparent whims of her husband, Wally spends her time dreaming about Mrs. Simpson, who regularly materializes in flashback. Wally's fascination edges into obsession when she learns that the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is going on the block at Sotheby's, where she worked before her husband forced her to quit. It's curious that the director, Madonna, one of the most publicly independent women of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, would create a character with the spine and personality of a soggy noodle. It's also unfortunate, because Wally doesn't stand a chance against the strangely transfixing Mrs. Simpson. The same holds true of Ms. Cornish, a lovely blur of an actress who here melts into misty memory every time Ms. Riseborough enters - her Wallis slithering across the screen, all silk, satin and sex - to pierce the bosom of her hapless consort. His royal blandness, Edward (James D'Arcy), never stood a chance, or so it seems. Certainly, whether crowned or not, he doesn't hold much interest for Madonna, who wrote the script with Alek Keshishian. Mr. Keshishian directed or just tagged after her in "Madonna: Truth or Dare." Early in "W.E." you hear a tinny female voice wafting from the ether to wax breathless about the Windsors. "Some people called it the greatest love story of the 20th century," the voice announces, adding that "the romantic legend lives on today." Well, maybe, though you wouldn't know it from the attention Madonna instead lavishes on Wally and Wallis, who initially intersect through the crosscutting and then - as their respective bad times worsen - begin speaking to each other across time and space. The upshot is that instead of a film about a love that conquered a king and nearly undid a kingdom, Madonna has come up with a female friendship movie, which would be fine if she weren't busy trying to prove her art-film bona fides. At her entertainer best Madonna distilled ideas and emotions into solid pop gold, transmitting a worldview through songs, music videos and her shape-shifter persona. The movies, by contrast, have largely defeated her both as an actress and as a director. As a mystical female friendship movie, "W.E." has its pull, but it never coheres, shredded by its editing and its pretensions, like Mrs. Simpson dancing to the Sex Pistols with a woman in African tribal regalia because, I'm guessing, Madonna likes the way Sofia Coppola used New Order's music in "Marie Antoinette." It's easy to see why a hugely unpopular woman like Wallis Simpson intrigued Madonna, who would have done better to stick with the past. Even if history doesn't interest her: Wally waves away accusations that the Windsors were Nazi sympathizers because they visited Hitler in 1937, two years, it should be mentioned, after Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws. Ms. Riseborough is a strong enough presence that she could hold your attention for an entire movie, and her absences are keenly felt, especially when Madonna becomes preoccupied by Wally's relationship with a sensitive security guard with puppy eyes, Evgeni (Oscar Isaac). The duke swept the duchess off her feet or vice versa, but from the way Madonna's camera caresses Evgeni it's obvious that her mind isn't on anyone's feet. "W.E." is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for language and domestic abuse. Directed by Madonna; written by Madonna and Alek Keshishian; director of photography, Hagen Bogdanski; edited by Danny B. Tull; music by Abel Korzeniowski; production design by Martin Childs; costumes by Arianne Phillips; produced by Madonna and Kris Thykier; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. WITH: Andrea Riseborough (Wallis Simpson), Abbie Cornish (Wally Winthrop), Richard Coyle (William Winthrop), James D'Arcy (Edward) and Oscar Isaac (Evgeni).