Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

The Marston household, as Angela Robinson reconstructs it, is a three-body problem solved by mutual consent. William, Elizabeth, and Olive fall into one another through lie detector tests and research notes, and the film treats their arrangement not as a scandal to be gawked at but as a working domestic economy. That the whole enterprise doubles as the origin story of Wonder Woman, with the costume prototyped on Olive's body and the bondage imagery lifted from fetish comics, gives the picture a tidy thesis. The private life explains the public artifact. Whether the historical Elizabeth and Olive were lovers is a question the surviving family answers with a flat no, and the film answers with three acts of yes.

The film's feminism is not subtext. It is the text, spoken aloud, repeatedly. Elizabeth takes a secretarial job and becomes the family's breadwinner while William flounders as an author. The Marstons pitch their heroine as an instrument for the women's movement, and the closing cards invoke Gloria Steinem's 1972 Ms. Magazine cover as a reclamation. Robinson lets her characters argue their positions in dialogue that occasionally sounds like a panel discussion with better lighting. The villains are censors and prudes, not markets or bosses, which keeps any economic critique entirely off the table.

The film's omissions are equally instructive. Race never enters the frame, and neither does climate, class, body image, or neurodivergence. The cast is uniformly white, and the story is set among Harvard academics and suburban bohemians. The progressive content here is sexual and gendered, a 2017 artifact concerned with desire and free expression. It is a handsomely mounted argument, well acted, sincere, and narrow. The Marstons themselves would likely have approved.