Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. There’s a sub-genre of films about poets, writers and intellectuals (usually from the 19th century, it seems) whose unconventional views of love leave them pariahs to much of society but whose legacy — as pioneers and as artists — let them endure: Impromptu (about George Sand and Fredric Chopin), Total Eclipse (Rimbaud and Verlaine), Haunted Summer (Byron and the Shelleys), Carrington, even Finding Neverland (Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie). The hook in many of these is how those private decisions informed their art but also shaped their public lives, often to dire effects.
So you might not be surprised to learn that William Moulton Marston, a psychologist whose work led to the creation of the first lie detector, is the same man that, under the pen-name Charles Moulton, created a “golden lasso” that forced the person encircled by it to tell the truth. But Wonder Woman’s notorious accessory also subdued and bound up its subjects — a fetishy touch that your 11-year-old consciousness didn’t catch onto, but your limbic brain detected as kinda kinky… kinda… hot.
Marston (Luke Evans) was totally into bondage — and much more — in his personal life. He and his wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) lived in a triad relationship with a colleague (Bella Heathcote) at a time when even the whisper of private deviance could be career-ending. But was Marston an uber-feminist, empowering women to become wonders, or a pervert exploiting them with proto-porn?
The recent death of Hugh Hefner has revitalized this debate about what feminism really means — a serendipitous occurrence that brings the story of Professor Marston into sharp relief. Writer-director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) has crafted a smart and beautiful period drama that delves into the risk and self-realization it takes to be one of those people who invents his or her own rules about the way to live. The film is frank without being lurid, sexual without titillation. The framing device of a politician (Connie Britton) cross-examining Marston for his “racy” comics doesn’t really work, or at least feels overly conventional. And when you’re making a movie about unconventional people, that’s a disservice. Just a small one, though: Professor Marston is a superhero movie about truly extraordinary people — not with super powers, but with guts.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. That’s the full title, shown twice during the movie, about the FBI agent who was eventually revealed to be the informant the Washington Post called Deep Throat, who passed secret information to reporter Bob Woodward, making the Watergate scandal, and subsequent resignation of the President Richard Nixon, possible. It would be difficult to overstate the allure of his story, except that this film is so ponderous (as even the title suggests) that it bores you to distraction.
The casting of Liam Neeson as Felt is an error; he’s a wonderful actor, but his late-career arc is that of the menacing, righteous vigilante — a nice fit for torture porn or international actioner, but not for the most compelling true-crime political story of our time. Felt doesn’t seem patriotic, or heroic, or even bitter at being passed over for promotion (he was one of Hoover’s loyalists who accumulated dirt on opponents, including closeted politicians). Woodward barely appears in the film and juicy Post coverage is barely alluded to. It’s more about his banal home life, with Diane Lane smoking, drinking and brooding her way through a thankless role as “political wife” and Felt trying to track down his wayward daughter. Writer-director Peter Landesman wants to telegraph how important Felt was (look at the title again!), but he does so only with a monotonously ominous and ubiquitous musical score (more of an unrelenting hum) and not his actual conduct. There are flashes where current politics trigger a visceral reaction (a line about confusion being their president’s smoke screen hits close to home), and the Nixon Administration’s corruption could be taken from today’s headlines. We could have used a rallying-cry movie to remind us how government owes the people, but with All the President’s Men as a template, this looks like the lamest of House of Cards episodes.
— Arnold Wayne Jones