3 lovers in age of Wonder
‘Professor Marston’ tells of unconventional life behind superheroine
It’s a lucky thing for us that William Marston eventually created Wonder Woman; otherwise, we would never know his story. A movie needs a destination, and historically based movies need some kind of event or achievement to justify them, and to that end, the creation of Wonder Woman will suffice. But the real fascination here is Marston himself and the two women in his life. Here’s a case of people who were not just ahead of their time, but outside of time altogether. They chose a way of life that would be daring and unconventional today and would have been met with scorn even a generation ago. Yet they were living in the 1920s. “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” is a story of courage and sacrifice, as well as a moving love story that’s really three love stories in one. It’s a very American tale in that it encap-
sulates about 150 years of American thinking with regard to sex and relationships. Marston and his wife, Elizabeth, and Olive Byrne, his student at Radcliffe, seem, in many ways, modern to us, but they were also riding a tide of Freudian thought that was just becoming mainstream in the 1920s. At the same time, their idealism about human possibility had echoes of early American social experiments, such as John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community in the mid-19th century.
As Marston, Luke Evans is a wide-eyed enthusiast, who at the start of the film is a psychology professor, teaching a theory of human personality that sounds more like an elaborate intellectualization of his own sexual proclivities. Basically, it’s an explanation of human behavior as a series of interactions based on impulses toward domination and submission.
His wife (Rebecca Hall) is as caustic and funny as he is earnest, but they share an openness, a mutual sense of being revolutionaries on the front lines of thought. They have the excitement of people living together inside a great idea, and their mutual project is the development of what will become the lie detector. Credit must be given to writer-director Angela Robinson, who might be the first filmmaker ever to figure out how to use the polygraph as an erotic prop: Just hook up a prospective lover and ask the big questions — “Do you love me? Do you want to have sex with me?” — and watch the needle jump.
Olive (Bella Heathcote) enters their lives as a 22-year-old research assistant. She is quiet and diffident, with a reflexive tendency to apologize all over herself. But she has an alto voice that gives the lie to her soprano looks, and that seems to be a metaphor for a personality with hidden depths. Plus, she has an encouraging pedigree: Her aunt was women’s rights activist Margaret Sanger, and her mother was a radical feminist.
That’s the dramatis personae, and how they interact and how their story plays out is best discovered as it happens, because the surprises here have nothing to do with grand movements in the world, but of thought and emotion. It is worth noting, however, that when Marston finally does devise Wonder Woman, supposedly as a vehicle for his psychological theories, it looks more like an expression of bondage and submission fantasies. It’s amazing how something so radical could hide in plain sight and become so mainstream. Maybe there was something to Marston’s theories, after all.
Robinson gets sterling performances from her cast, but the most striking — the one possibly deserving of end-ofyear honors — is that of Rebecca Hall, who gives Elizabeth a powerful internal and external life. There’s drive, ambition and a huge personality and also conflict, fear and the possibility of anger. It’s the portrait of a great woman, forcibly contained by her times.
Speaking of women and the times, we are still in that phase of seeing movies that were made in 2016, before the election. So we get a line in the movie — “Young women have the power to create their own destiny, to be president of the United States if they want” — that was clearly intended as a wink and a nod. But no one on our side of the screen is winking or nodding.