PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN: An Ode To Living An Unconventional Life

Wonder Woman is the most famous female superhero in the world, but much less is known about the incredibly unusual man who created her, psychologist William Moulton Marston. Among the many items on his eclectic resume, Marston was a university professor, the inventor of the systolic blood pressure test that became a crucial component of the lie detector test, and the author of popular psychology essays espousing his DISC theory (Dominance, Inducement, Submissiveness, Compliance). He also lived in a very private polyamorous relationship with two women and the children he fathered with both of them. His lifelong focus on feminism, bondage and submissiveness bled through into his comics and courted all kinds of controversy.

Writer-director Angela Robinson’s new film, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, seeks to shed light on Marston and the two remarkable women who inspired him to create the character that he once referred to as “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.” Despite what one might originally think, Robinson’s script is not based on Jill Lepore’s acclaimed 2014 biography of Marston, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

Indeed, if you’ve read that book – as I have – you’ll definitely find your eyebrows raised during some of the scenes in Robinson’s film. Robinson plays fast and loose with the facts – or rather, what few facts we actually have about the private going-ons of the Marston household. The resulting film is entertaining and empowering ode to the freedom that comes with living an unconventional life, but it’s also one that even Robinson acknowledges should be viewed as her own interpretation of the Marston story.

When Three Isn’t a Crowd

Professor Marston (Luke Evans, fresh off his scene-stealing turn as Gaston in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast) teaches college psychology alongside his wife, Elizabeth (the perpetually underrated Rebecca Hall). Despite being just as accomplished as her husband, Elizabeth is unable to serve as a full professor herself because Harvard won’t give her the Ph.D. she deserves due to her being a woman. Yet Marston always treats her as an equal partner in his work, not just a helpmate.

Soon the Marstons’ seemingly perfect marriage is rocked by the arrival of a young woman named Olive Byrne (a luminous Bella Heathcote). Soft, blonde and angelic in contrast to Elizabeth’s dark hair and sharp tongue, Olive immediately catches Marston’s eye and earns a job as his teaching assistant for that semester as a reward. Elizabeth rolls her eyes at her husband’s obvious infatuation and claims that Marston can do as he likes, as she experiences no sexual jealousy, yet upon first meeting Olive Elizabeth immediately makes the younger woman cry by bluntly asking her to not sleep with her husband.

When Marston confronts Elizabeth about her meanness to Olive, and asks her what happened to her lack of sexual jealousy, Elizabeth retorts that it was professional jealousy that inspired her outburst. It’s a hilarious moment that perfectly encapsulates what makes these two women so different and yet so equally appealing to Marston. As he notes later in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the two of them combined make what is in his eyes the perfect woman.

It takes longer for Elizabeth to warm up to Olive than it does for Marston, but in the end she does – and then some. Soon, it becomes clear that both Marston and Elizabeth have fallen in love with for Olive and, despite having a frat-boy fiance, Olive has fallen in love with both of them in return. It’s a complicated situation for our modern times, let alone in the years prior to World War II when the old-fashioned nuclear family was the only one visible in society.

Despite the difficulties presented by a potential three-way relationship, the Marstons and Olive decide to give this unconventional set-up a go, albeit in secret. Olive moves in with the Marstons in the guise of a widow who helps with the housework and raises the family’s children – both hers and Elizabeth’s, all fathered by Marston. Obstacles to their happiness include worries about losing their jobs and being shunned by their neighbors should the true nature of their relationship be discovered. Yet amidst all of the secrets and lies, Marston is inspired by the two women he loves – not to mention Olive’s aunt, the famous birth control activist and feminist Margaret Sanger – to create a female superhero who would fight for values like truth and love.

Wonderful Women

Robinson gets excellent performances out of all of her actors, including a career-best from Rebecca Hall, who seems born to play a brash, brilliant and nontraditional woman like Elizabeth. Hall is one of those actresses that Hollywood has never seemed to know what to do with, perhaps because she’s too unconventionally beautiful and sharp around the edges to play the parts of an ingenue. But those qualities are what make her absolutely perfect for this role.

There are not enough female characters like Elizabeth in movies that take place in modern times, let alone in period pictures; she is a foul-mouthed, whiskey-drinking woman with a husband who appreciates and encourages her brains and ambition. I found her incredibly empowering and refreshing, especially as played by Hall.

Heathcote, who has proven to be a talented up-and-comer in projects as wide-ranging as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Neon Demon and Fifty Shades Darker, does an admirable job holding her own as the much more submissive Olive opposite the force of nature that is Elizabeth. As their relationship develops over the years, Olive gradually grows into the dominant side of her personality, while Elizabeth is forced to embrace her inner submissive; Hall and Heathcote portray this subtle but all-too-important evolution as naturally as if they had actually spent years together under the same roof. Evans, as Professor Marston, does a fine job too, but he is frequently overshadowed by his Wonder Women.

The three strong central performances help distract from some weak storytelling decisions, such as a strained framing device that shows Marston being interrogated by Josette Frank (Connie Britton), director of the Child Study Association of America, over the kink and bondage in the Wonder Woman comics. These scenes should feel high-stakes, but they feel stiff and boring compared to the rest of the film, likely because Marston’s real-life Wonder Women aren’t in them. In addition, scenes that attempt to easily explain away certain aspects Wonder Woman – in particular, a dramatic scene in a bondage shop in which Olive appears clad in a bustier, tiara and rope, perfectly backlit – feel way too forced.

Like Marston’s relationship with the two women who inspired him, nothing about the invention of Wonder Woman was this easy, but unlike that relationship, there are at least more facts to support how Wonder Woman came to be. Indeed, according to all accounts, it was Elizabeth who insisted that her husband should make his new superhero be a woman; in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Elizabeth is dismissive and tells her husband no one will buy such comics.

This is just one of the many loose interpretations of William Moulton Marston’s story that has led his granddaughter Chrissie Marston to denounce Robinson’s portrayal of her family as being pure imagination. The real sticking point? Chrissie says that Elizabeth and Olive were never in love with each other; despite living together for decades after Marston’s death, raising all of his children together, she claims the two women were more sisters than lovers.

Now, that can of course be open to interpretation; there might be a lot that went on behind closed doors that Chrissie and other members of the Marston family didn’t know about. Reading Lepore’s book, despite her never stating that the women were a couple, it is easy to believe that these three sexually adventurous, radical feminists were all lovers together instead of as two separate pairs. But for Robinson to build her entire film around that assumption feels irresponsible.

Conclusion: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women features the kind of truly strong female characters that we still don’t get enough of on the big screen, and its portrayal of a loving and romantic polyamorous relationship is groundbreaking. I almost wish I had not read Lepore’s book prior to seeing it, for then I wouldn’t have questioned anything in it and would have purely enjoyed it for what it is: a great movie.

Not to say that Lepore’s book should be the be-all, end-all when it comes to Marston’s story, but to essentially ignore it when making a movie that tells the same story is a strange choice. To not consult the surviving members of the Marston family seems even stranger. Robinson claims a reliable source informed her that the women were lovers, but if that was the case, who was it? It’s as though Robinson decided ahead of time what kind of story she wanted to tell and only did the research that would support that particular story.

When removed from any obsessive thinking about the truth, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women entertains and inspires just as much as any superhero movie. But that nagging feeling in the back of my mind kept me from enjoying the film to the full extent that I could have.

What do you think? Is it problematic to take artistic license with the lives of real people – especially when they have family members still living? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was released in the U.S. on October 13, 2017 and will be released in the UK on November 10, 2017. More international release dates can be found here.