Well, now we know how she got that golden lasso. “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” digs up the real-life roots of the comic-book Amazon who took this summer’s box office𝐆 by storm — and it is one juicy backstory, although director Angela Rob🐻inson’s burnished rendition frequently plays it too safe.
Luke Evans (“Beauty and the Beast”) is William Moulton Marston, creator of “Wonder Woman” and psychology Ph.D. holder. Connie Britton, in tidy pincurls, is the head of a children’s morality board that interrogates Marston about the💜 S&M-ish content of his comics, and the film cuts between their interview and his past, which begins with his college lectures in the 1920s. He’s worked up a theory about dominance and submission as conduits to social and gender equality (although, given his winking presentation, he also seems to viಌew them as possible conduits to sleeping with grad students). His wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), is an equally driven psychologist, brilliant and sarcastic, who resents that she can’t get equal standing as an academic simply because of her anatomy.
The devoted but unconventional couple are collaborating on inventing a lie detector but can’t quite get it right — until they enli♌st a new grad-student assistant, Olive (Bella Heathcote), who gets the couple’s blood pumping a little faster (and makes them realize that’s the key to the whole lie detect𓃲or thing). Making Olive even more attractive is the fact that she’s the descendant of two radical feminists, including her aunt, birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger.
Soon, the trio is enmeshed in a polyamorous relationship — i💛llicit and possibly dangerous in their era — which kicks off with a gauzily lit threeway on the university’s set of a Greek play. A sho𝓰t of Olive playfully trying on a Greek goddess costume, complemented by her omnipresent silver bracelets, suggests the subconscious birth of Wonder Woman in Marston’s brain. A visit to a fetish shop, where Olive dons a burlesque outfit and picks up a coiled rope, fleshes it out.
The comic really takes shape after the trio is ousted from academia, with Marston penning it under his middle name and hawking it to a sleazy comics purveyor (Oliver Platt) as “psychological propaganda to further the cause of equal rights of women.” Wonder Woman clearly bears characteristics of both Elizabeth and Olive, and Robinson has assembled a fascinating collection of images from the old comics, whichও really do seem outré in comparison to the likes of today’s Marvel and DC heroes. Meanwhile, Marston, his wife and their mistress put their own spin on a happy home, trying to keep their private life secreted away from the neighbors.
Hall and Heathcote are terrific here; Evans is unfortunately often relegated to wa🦹tching their clinches from the sidelines with a loving gaze that seems to border on a leer, although I’m genuinely not sure whether that’s the character or just Evans’ face. Either way, the film’s a little like “Secretary” by way of a generic Hollywood prestige biopic — brimming with intelligence, feminism and kink but seemingly hamstrung (or maybe hogtied?) by a desire not to offend.