Professor Marston and The Wonder Woman. (15.)
Directed by Angela Britton
Starring Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcoate, JJ Feild and Oliver Platt. 108 mins.
The origins story is the curse of any superhero movie, the unsatisfying piece of radioactive inspired improbability that brings the character into being. Here, for a change, we get the unsatisfying and improbable tale of how Wonder Woman was created by a disgraced psychologist, and inventor of the lie detector, who saw it as a vehicle for his beliefs in female emaciation and bondage.
Professor William (Evans) Marston's disgrace happens in the mid-30s when he is discovered to be involved in a three-sided relationship with his wife (Hall) and their favoured student (Heathcoate.) These three really are the entire movie: either because writer Britton didn't have any interest outside of them, or because director Britton didn't have the budget to shoot anything else.
Heathcoate has a fresh Heather Graham-like face that seems to invite corruption but Evans, though game, is not a convincing academic. It falls to Hall to hold the thing together, which she does with a sense of withering disdain and superiority. She is the best thing in it, but it is a little dispiriting to see her turn into Glenda Jackson, purveyor of high quality, fully rounded battle axes. And to be a Glenda Jackson without a Ken Russell. Britton doesn't have the kinks and quirks to make this come to life. Her writing and staging are consistently flat. The worst moment perhaps is during their first three-way sexual encounter, when Nina Simone's Feeling Good pipes up on the soundtrack. This is partly because the track isn't contemporaneous, but mostly because it connects to the scene in the crudest way possible.
I think we can also complain that the film doesn't quite explain its characters' motivation. Marston's big idea is DISC – Dominance, Inducement, Compliance, Submission. The film wants us to believe that he was some kind of free love visionary, but on the evidence of this film, he could just as well be seen as someone who was using the comic book form to try and subvert the attitudes of the next generation into being more accepting of his own personal fetishes. I mean, live and let live and each to their own and all that, but anyone whose primary source of erotic release is tying knots is a distinctly odd, no?
Directed by Angela Britton
Starring Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcoate, JJ Feild and Oliver Platt. 108 mins.
The origins story is the curse of any superhero movie, the unsatisfying piece of radioactive inspired improbability that brings the character into being. Here, for a change, we get the unsatisfying and improbable tale of how Wonder Woman was created by a disgraced psychologist, and inventor of the lie detector, who saw it as a vehicle for his beliefs in female emaciation and bondage.
Professor William (Evans) Marston's disgrace happens in the mid-30s when he is discovered to be involved in a three-sided relationship with his wife (Hall) and their favoured student (Heathcoate.) These three really are the entire movie: either because writer Britton didn't have any interest outside of them, or because director Britton didn't have the budget to shoot anything else.
Heathcoate has a fresh Heather Graham-like face that seems to invite corruption but Evans, though game, is not a convincing academic. It falls to Hall to hold the thing together, which she does with a sense of withering disdain and superiority. She is the best thing in it, but it is a little dispiriting to see her turn into Glenda Jackson, purveyor of high quality, fully rounded battle axes. And to be a Glenda Jackson without a Ken Russell. Britton doesn't have the kinks and quirks to make this come to life. Her writing and staging are consistently flat. The worst moment perhaps is during their first three-way sexual encounter, when Nina Simone's Feeling Good pipes up on the soundtrack. This is partly because the track isn't contemporaneous, but mostly because it connects to the scene in the crudest way possible.
I think we can also complain that the film doesn't quite explain its characters' motivation. Marston's big idea is DISC – Dominance, Inducement, Compliance, Submission. The film wants us to believe that he was some kind of free love visionary, but on the evidence of this film, he could just as well be seen as someone who was using the comic book form to try and subvert the attitudes of the next generation into being more accepting of his own personal fetishes. I mean, live and let live and each to their own and all that, but anyone whose primary source of erotic release is tying knots is a distinctly odd, no?
