SHORT TAKE
Trailing in the wake of the promising but ultimately tedious Wonder Woman, and timed for release the same week as DC’s latest behemoth Justice League, is Angela Robinson’s titillating and incisive biopic of Diana Prince’s creator, William Moulton Marston.
The film restores the corseted superhero’s dissident and subversive origins to their rightful primacy.
Marston, played by Luke Evans, was a prominent psychologist who dreamt up a behavioural theory based on wilful submission and domination. He lived in a ménage à trois with wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) and former student Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote).
These two remarkable women formed the basis for Marston’s now-iconic Nazi-fighting, lasso-wielding heroine (Byrne was descended from early 20thcentury radical feminists Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger), and their forays into kinky novelties resulted in the comic’s early pages being filled with bondage and S&M, which drew authorities’ ire.
Heirs of the Marston clan have since rebuked the film for taking liberties with the truth, but the relationship shown here is both tender and outrageously naughty (proof that hereafter all sex scenes should be soundtracked by Nina Simone). Hall shines out from the cast, with a seductive transatlantic accent and wickedly acerbic tongue.
An occasional soppiness infects the film, but does not cripple it. Rather, it’s a fond and fitting rebuke to the more prosaic and watered-down version of Wonder Woman currently gracing our screens. IN CINEMAS NOW James Robins