We meet Professor Bill Marston (Luke Evans) in the late 1940s as he defends his lucrative creation, Wonder Woman, from a moral code investigation into the comic book’s lurid subtext. Set against stark, desaturated shots of the psychologist and writer having to explain himself to an unsmiling, denouncing interviewer are montages of the colorful pages of the comic that illustrate its thinly veiled subtext of bondage, erotica and first-wave feminism, all of which are condemned by powers looking to clean up the industry. On their face, such scenes present a bracing context to the current pop-culture dominance of comic books and superheroes, a corrective to the notion that the format has only truly matured within the last generation. Here, in the pages of one of the foundational superhero comics’ earliest issues, is a forthright sexuality that was forcibly buried by government and third-party pressure for decades.
Yet Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is not a polemical defense of comics’ capacity for subversion so much as a tender, often mournful look into the relationship of those who created the iconic character. Marston himself forms only the point of a triangle completed by his wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), whom Marston hires as his research assistant due to his attraction to her, which he frames both in terms of psychological experimentation and earnest lust. Elizabeth semi-tolerates this flight of passion, allowing him to hire the coed but going behind his back to tell the baffled girl not to sleep with her husband. Gradually, however, everyone’s guard loosens, and complex bonds of attachment form between all three.
Many of the film’s best moments concern the increasingly bold displays of mutual attraction between the group. This dovetails nicely into a subplot involving the Marstons’ research into early lie detector technology. Stumbling across the idea of using systolic blood pressure as a valid, measurable indicator of dishonesty, the trio realizes that only meaningful lies can trigger the necessary stress to produce results, leading to Elizabeth strapping in her husband and confronting him about his attraction to Olive. The scene, scored only to the gentle scratching of the lie detector needle etching readings into a wax cylinder, ratchets up the erotic tension with well-timed edits that pull focus onto Elizabeth’s baiting questions, Olive’s nervousness and Bill’s mounting terror at being trapped as his invention betrays him. When the tension boils over, the three find themselves in an unorthodox, not to mention socially unacceptable, relationship.
The shared, frequently shifting dynamics among the three characters form the backbone of the narrative, and the film hinges upon the actors’ performances. Evans plays Bill with academic condescension and superiority, preternaturally incapable of explaining himself without sounding like he is doing you a favor for deigning to do so. Even with his livelihood on the line when defending his comic book, Bill speaks like a man inconvenienced. Nonetheless, Bill is also capable of extreme vulnerability, and if he sets the love triangle in motion with his pursuit of Olive, he nonetheless betrays an unabashed sentimentality for the women in his life. Likewise, Olive’s initial façade of naiveté and innocence gives way to her passionate, confident exploration of her sexuality.
Hall, meanwhile, adds to her ever-lengthening resumé of show-stealing performances. No sooner do we meet Elizabeth then we are treated to her lacerating wit and defiant rejection of double standards. Working as her husband’s assistant, she rages that Harvard will not award her the same doctorate that he received despite her equal (and in some cases, superior) achievement. Hall always angles herself in the frame, capturing the way that Elizabeth disrupts prim and proper postwar mores with her radiant flamboyance. There’s a dash of Katharine Hepburn to Hall’s performance, all clipped, terse exchanges that delight in flaunting whatever moldy norms challenge her.
Yet as the polyamorous relationship blossoms, it’s Elizabeth who emerges as the most tender of the group, and the one most terrified of being discovered. The early scenes of her anger at being overlooked feed into her later paranoia, imbuing her with the knowledge of how easily everything can be taken from them. When strangers inquire about the three of them, Elizabeth is just a bit too hasty to deliver her rehearsed cover story for Olive’s co-habitation, generating suspicion in an attempt to avoid it. The distance between her fear and her love of both her husband and Olive propel much of the film’s second half, deriving drama from the widening gyre between her desire and her pragmatic rejection of it.
The actors have such chemistry with each other that it’s a comedown of sorts when the underlying story of their pop culture creation comes to the fore. That this happens most frequently during the film’s most erotic scenes undercuts the power of its moments of sexual discovery and exploration. The group’s first threesome, for example, is performed in the backstage of a school play where Olive dresses in a Greek tunic that presages Wonder Woman’s backstory, while the group’s formal introduction to kink and bondage ends with the young woman dressed in much the same outfit that would form the character’s look, complete with rope play that would inspire her golden lasso. The overbearing significance of every aspect of these scenes becomes too much of a distraction, and for all that the movie pushes back against the pressures of social constraint, its constant return to formal rigor frustratingly limits a film that excels when it gives its characters room simply to explore each other.
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