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.
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| Flush with the "forbidden" delights of their blossoming three-way relationship, Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall, left), her husband William (Luke Evans) and their "plus one" Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) unwisely fail to consider how their behavior will affect fellow Tufts University faculty and students. |
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.
