The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
A second delicious helping of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
We’ve watched the film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women for a second time now and thought we’d relay some observations. First, the film’s writer and director, Angela Robinson, must be commended for delivering a tremendously well-made movie. The intelligence and wit of the characters is something marvelous to behold. But more importantly, the intelligence and wit of the script, and the way it achieves its ends without an ounce of fat, is a rare and more wonderful beast. The wise (and illuminating) use of broken chronology, exercised through intermittent returns to a meeting between Mr. Marston and skeptical members of the Child Study Association of America, provides a helpful through-line for both the themes presented and the twists and turns of the Marston story. The film is so very well-balanced: the social themes, the historical detail, the personal journeys, the bondage and the gentle love, the lust and the yearning of hearts. In the end, it all blends together seamlessly, logically, and humanely.
The manner in which the film conveys the repressive spirit of the times depicted—1928 through 1945, yet not all that unlike our current day in relation to polyamory—while not making straw dogs or demons of any person or institution is impressive. And in the same spirit, filmmaker Angela Robinson does not make the lead characters out to be simple, blandly heroic figureheads. William Marston (Luke Evans), Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall), and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) are fully realized, full of breath and blood, and their relationships, which were not without their difficulties, were not whitewashed for filmic purposes. The historical accuracy of the depiction—as well as the resulting movie itself—is all the stronger for it.
The actors are each amazing in their own way but the film would’ve faltered greatly if it hadn’t been for the razor-honed emotions displayed in Bella Heathcote’s performance. It was absolutely essential to the integrity of the experience that the viewer gain the full perspective of what is happening within this woman. Surrounded by the spot-on, delicately-tuned work of Hall and Evans, Heathcote’s nuance achieves that, and more.
Angela Robinson is again to be applauded for her writing and directing. In the hands of a less mindful steward this movie could well have dripped with melodrama or salacious gawkery. Instead it sings quite sweetly in favor of a more open-minded, and truly charitable, society—all in the course of telling the true story of three people in love. As the Los Angeles Times concluded its review of the film, “‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women’ … pays engaging, accessible homage to three gifted minds who found liberation in bondage to one another, and in the process turned their home into their greatest adventure.”
Thursday, February 15, 2018