Can Wonder Woman's year get any better? Turns out, yes.
A few months after her first big screen outing dominated the box office, her real-life origin story is coming to theaters in the form of a biopic, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. And like Wonder Womanbefore it, Professor Marstonfeels both comfortingly familiar and quietly groundbreaking.
SEE ALSO:Fall movie preview: What to watch if you're obsessed with superheroesDr. William Moulton Marston is typically credited as the creator of Wonder Woman. But like last year's Hidden Figures, Professor Marstongives the lie to the assumption that creative brilliance is the sole province of tortured and solitary assholes. Wonder Woman, in this telling, is borne of the romance and collaboration between three people: Bill Marston, Elizabeth Marston, and Olive Byrne.
In 1928, Bill (Luke Evans) is a professor of psychology at Harvard. He's happily married to Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), an academic whose even greater brilliance goes overlooked because she's a woman.
The couple have pinned their hopes on a new gadget they're inventing – a lie detector machine, which they dream will become so big that the establishment will have no choice but to acknowledge Elizabeth. Then Olive comes into their lives, first as a student in Bill's class, and then as the couple's research assistant, and then as their lover, and all three lives take on a different shape.
For much of its running time, Professor Marstonis a love story, and a sweet, sexy one at that. Just as Bill and Elizabeth looked for physiological "tells" that would let their machine unlock the truth in a person's heart, writer-director Angela Robinson lets this romance develop through minute physical gestures – a soft sigh, a bite of the lip, a glance held too long. When these desires are finally consummated, it feels Earth-shattering at first, and then joyous.
Although Wonder Woman isn't created until the second half of the movie, her shadow looms large throughout. Bill's 1945 interview with a censorship board is used as a framing device for his backstory, facilitating connections between the imagery of "violence, torture, and sadomasochism" found in the Wonder Woman comics and the beliefs and passions that guided his own life.
Professor Marstonfalls victim to the usual biopic pitfalls at times, getting a little too cute or heavy-handed with the foreshadowing. At one point, a publisher suggests to Bill that he change the title of his proposed book. He doesn't actually say"Drop the 'Suprema.' Just 'Wonder Woman.' It's cleaner." But he might as well have, for how familiar that moment feels.
Still, Professor Marstonsucceeds where so many biopics fail – in showing us its subjects as more than just the sum of their accomplishments, and getting to the heart of the maddening but all-too-human contradictions that drive them forward.
This is truest of all of Elizabeth, who's outwardly brash and opinionated, but inwardly terrified. It's not that her give-no-fucks attitude is a front. It's that Bill is a man and Olive is a beautiful young woman, while Elizabeth's always been a bit of an outsider. More than either of her lovers, she knows all too well the struggle of trying to live outside of the usual societal boundaries.
Hall's performance as Elizabeth is nothing short of remarkable – you can see Elizabeth's conflicting emotions, and her continual efforts to tamp them down, playing out across her face with just a tremble of a lip. All three lead performances are marvelous, but Hall's is the one that stayed with me all the way home.
If Professor Marstonfeels a little bit conventional at times, that, in itself, is kind of incredible. When's the last time you saw a historical drama that involved a kinky polyamorous relationship at all, let alone one framed as happy, healthy, and loving? Or one that allowed a man to be as tender and emotional as Bill is here, or a woman as complicated as Elizabeth is?
The Wonder Woman comics didn't invent the superhero genre, but it changed our ideas about what superheroes could be. Wonder Womandidn't jumpstart the superhero movie craze, but it made the wave more inclusive.
Likewise, Professor Marston and the Wonder Womendoesn't reinvent the biopic – but it expands our ideas about the kinds of stories that biopics can tell.
TopicsComicsWonder Woman
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