Professor Marston and the Wonder Women - Review

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Luke Evans and Rebecca Hall (aka for “The Town”) star in the film called “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women”. An unconventional true life story of Dr. William Marston, a Harvard psychologist and inventor of the lie detector, his academic wife and their student assistant who all collectively became the inspiration for the iconic “Wonder Woman”.

Taking place around the early 1940’s the film itself isn’t just a story about creating a comic book character named “Wonder Woman”, it’s an up in your face sexually charged film that is both a honest and positive depiction of a polyamory relationship between the three people that contributed mightily to the comic book super heroine’s creation. In the film, William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Rebecca Hall), and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) slowly come to having a triangular relationship that includes working professionally together, becoming emotional and romantic bonded through steamy ménage à trois with one another to eventually moving in with one another for their entire life and having children with one another.

Director Angela Robinson does a solid job in bringing this film to an intellectual light without making it simply a super awkward story about people just having sex together. She effectively  recreates the political and social environment where their comic book and their personal relationship were considered both taboo and illegal for the 1940’s. But it is Robinson's direction ultimately that moves the story skillfully along as we see initially the well intention married couple's raison d etra (their reasons for being) in their legitimate academic pursuits become increasingly side track by their growing intimate passion for their female assistant. Its this romantic transition in their personal lives and their exploration of their unusual sexual relationship - their own experiences that help give rise to the conceptual idea of "Wonder Woman", the Amazonian female hero.

“Professor Marston and the Wonder Women" is not a feminist film, but a very sincere film about acts of personal bravery where (in their case) these three unique people did in fact find love with each other. A profound passionate deep seeded love bound by a genuine commitment to one another, that even after some initial episodes of anger and confusion, a realization that they could never ever live without the other.

3.00 Stars