Three stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, profanity, brief nudity and fleeting graphic images
By Derrick Bang
Although persuasively acted,
sensitively directed and reasonably faithful to established fact,
writer/director Angela Robinson’s take on comic book heroine Wonder Woman most
frequently feels like a giddy endorsement of unconventional sexual lifestyles.
Goodness knows, the actual saga
tops the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction List, as recently revealed via
comprehensive feature stories from National Public Radio, Smithsonian Magazine and The
New Yorker, along with — most particularly — Harvard historian Jill
Lepore’s fascinating 2015 book, The
Secret History of Wonder Woman. Robinson had no shortage of research
material, from which to draw.
But while the world’s best-known
female superhero has been made the selling point of this unusual big-screen
biography — the character’s status having accelerated exponentially, thanks to
summer’s smash-hit film — Wonder Woman is mostly incidental to the story being
told here. Robinson had other things on her mind.
The saga begins in 1925, as
Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) begins
teaching a large assemblage of young women at Tufts University. His wife
Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is a ubiquitous presence, forever perched in the
classroom window seat. An equally accredited psychologist and lawyer, she
sharply observes — and records, via jotted notes — how the students respond,
individually and as a group, during her husband’s lectures.
William and Elizabeth are a
prickly but passionately devoted team, in and out of the classroom. He’s
smooth, intelligent and seductively persuasive: a silver-tongued orator who’d
have made a terrific snake-oil salesman. She’s bluntly combative, judgmental,
sharp-tongued and even more ferociously smart. They constantly challenge each
other, even as they love and collaborate in numerous endeavors ... not the
least of which is the development of a functional lie-detector device.
In class, William’s gaze is drawn
to the radiantly gorgeous Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a senior who becomes
his research assistant ... which is to say, she becomes their research assistant. William ostensibly insists that Olive is
the perfect subject with whom to explore the active/passive aspects of a “DISC
theory” — dominance, inducement, submission and compliance — that he believes
governs all human behavior.
In reality, he just wants to bed
Olive. Which Elizabeth realizes full well, and about which she’s ambivalent. At
initial blush, William’s desire seems a non-starter; the quietly shy Olive, a
seemingly conservative sorority girl, is engaged to a Nice Young Man.
Ah, but Olive’s still waters go
deep indeed, as becomes clear when her admiration for Elizabeth proves to have
less to do with academics, and more with breath-catching, heart-stopping ardor.
Which she helplessly reveals, during a session with the Marstons’ newly
perfected lie detector (one of Robinson’s best-composed and amusing sequences).
As an equal celestial body
orbiting Olive’s sexual interest, Elizabeth’s ambivalence ... vanishes.
Olive’s behavior seems to emerge
out of the blue, but perhaps not. Robinson coyly suggests that unorthodox
behavior may have been in her genes, given that the young woman is the daughter
of radical feminist Ethel Byrne, who in turn is the younger sister of birth
control activist Margaret Sanger. (Those two women quite infamously opened the
first birth-control clinic in the United States.)
What follows is the first of
several playfully kinky erotic montages, as this giddily enraptured threesome
indulges in late-night sexual role-playing, courtesy of the university’s
theater costume shop. It’s sexy and touchingly intimate: alluringly lensed in a
candlelight style by cinematographer Bryce Fortner, and seductively
choreographed by Robinson and editor Jeffrey M. Werner.
At the risk of succumbing to
gender stereotypes, the sequence’s tender warmth seems the result of a woman’s
touch; I can’t help feeling that a male director would have made it lurid and
more aggressively exploitative.
The subsequent polygynous
relationship affords William all sorts of data points for his DISC theories. It
also gets him fired, as the trio’s discretion is somewhat wanting. Relocating
to a quiet suburban neighborhood, with Olive assuming a “secret identity” as
Elizabeth’s widowed sister, William struggles for employment.
Years pass. Now in the early
1940s, and thanks to a fortuitous visit to a clandestine S&M emporium,
William begins to toy with the notion of a female counterpart to comic book
sensation Superman: a warrior adapted from Greek myth, who exemplifies
Williams’ longstanding belief in feminine superiority.
And whose adventures inevitably
seem to involve dollops of bondage and suggestive sadomasochism. (If this flies
in the face of your notions regarding Wonder Woman, you’ve not seen her
earliest four-color escapades.)
Both actresses are sublime. At
first blush, Hall’s Elizabeth is hilariously brittle; we practically feel her
sharp edges. She swears uninhibitedly, seeming to delight in the impact of
F-bombs in the refined university environment. Hall taunts, teases and
tantalizes with equal aplomb, all of which is part of a hardened shell that
conceals her innermost feelings ... until it doesn’t.
At which point, Hall reveals a
wholly unexpected level of vulnerability: the emotional insecurity of a woman
who has endured too much professional and personal disappointment — as a woman — and fears opening herself
to more.
Heathcote’s Olive, on the other
hand, starts out closeted: timid, fragile and easily overwhelmed by — and no
match for — Elizabeth’s ruthless candor. The delicacy of Heathcote’s
performance comes each time we watch Olive struggle against social decorum to
reveal her true feelings.
The critical moment, when another
round of costume play proves the unexpected a-ha
moment for William’s gestating super heroine, is a thing of breathtaking
delicacy: a scene that easily could have been ruined by too strong a
directorial touch, or a single line given the wrong reading. But Hall and
Heathcote are transcendent — and that is
the word — and Robinson displays just the right touch.
Although William plays an equal
role in these sexual hijinks, he comes fully formed; we don’t get any sense of
character evolution, as with the two women. More often than not, Evans gives
the guy a self-satisfied, cat-who-ate-the-canary smirk. Not a leer, to be fair;
there’s no sense that he’s exploiting these two women, and the actor is never
less than earnest, when William explains and/or justifies his psychological
theories.
And yet we can’t help questioning
the trio’s recklessness, even selfishness, particularly when children —
ultimately four of them — enter the picture. Robinson makes it all seem too
easy, as if this unconventional relationship were the most natural thing in the
world; she glosses over what must have been decades of furtive anxiety and
concealment from what these three knew would be denunciation and disgust from
the general public.
Only once does Robinson pay token
lip service to the results of such exposure, and it’s wholly insufficient.
Her film also is bookended by an
extremely clumsy framing device: William’s cross-examination, a few years after
Wonder Woman’s comic book debut, by children’s literature expert and Child
Study Association head Josette Frank (Connie Britton). She wields the authority
to shut down comic book publisher M.C. Gaines (Oliver Platt), because of WW’s
scandalous behavior and portrayal.
This inquisition prompts the
flashback memories that become the bulk of the film, but the process itself is
pointless, particularly given the manner in which it concludes. It’s one of the
few times that Robinson’s narrative presence feels contrived, and (very likely)
historically inaccurate.
Overall, the 108-minute film also
is too talky, and begins to feel tiresome by the third act. Robinson’s
relentless focus on sexual dynamics comes at the expense of William’s much too
superficially depicted introduction to Gaines, and their eventual alliance. On
top of which, the story’s conclusion feels quite rushed and sketchy, as if
Robinson suddenly were in a hurry to be done with it.
While Robinson clearly has the
sensibilities to properly direct Professor
Marston and the Wonder Women, she should have reassigned the scripting
chores to somebody who could have delivered a more balanced treatment of these
events. They certainly deserve it.
(Oh, and a point of accuracy: A
final text block claiming that Wonder Woman was “stripped of all her powers,”
immediately following William Marston’s death, is completely inaccurate. The
character lost her powers only briefly in the late 1960s, when a writer made
the ill-advised decision to re-cast the character as a mortal clone of Diana
Rigg’s Emma Peel, of the then-popular TV series The Avengers. The decision was rescinded quickly, in the wake of
Wonder Woman’s appearance on the cover of a 1971 issue of Ms. magazine.)
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