Three heads are better than two

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Rialto) is a hard movie to talk about because it spans about 20 years of complicated personal history and I am reluctant to give too much away.

 

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN

Director: Angela Robinson
Cast: Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote, Connie Britton, Oliver Platt
Rating: (R13)
★★★★ (out of five)

 

In 1928 William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) seemed on the verge of a brilliant academic career. A professor of psychology at Harvard he had developed his own theory of human drivers, called Disc. He was happily married to Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), a woman who was his intellectual equal, and together they were mucking around in the lab trying to perfect a lie detector machine. 

A requirement to lecture at Radcliffe, the all-women’s college  that shared professors with Harvard but could not give Harvard qualifications, changed the course of his life.

A young student, Olive Byrne, (Bella Heathcote) caught his eye and instead of reacting with conventional jealousy, Elizabeth forged a friendship with her.  Soon the intense emotions that their three-way dialogue stirred up gave them the insights needed to make new breakthroughs. 

It should all be academic glory from then on but instead scandal made things difficult. But Marston was not a man to let things get him down and he came up with a novel way to get his theory through to the masses.

This is a movie that is fascinating but not particularly emotionally engaging. I enjoyed it, but was never swept away into an uncritical acceptance that I was being shown the inner truth of these people’s relationships. 

- Christine Powley

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