Old Yorker

  • Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Angela Robinson (2017)

    Professor Marston and the Wonder Women went on general release in Britain on 10 November, when it opened in nine venues across London.  A week later, that number was down to two.  By the end of the month, Professor Marston had disappeared.  I must be one of a rather small group of London filmgoers who’ve not seen Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman but have seen Angela Robinson’s film.  It’s a strange one.  I quite enjoyed and liked it.  All three principal actors are, in different ways, engaging.  But writer-director Robinson never finds a satisfactory way of telling her extraordinary (based on a) true story.

    William Moulton Marston, born in 1893, was an American psychologist and inventor of an early prototype of the lie detector.   In 1928, Marston published Emotions of Normal People, in which he set out his ‘DISC theory’, based on behavioural patterns of Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance[1].  He held a Harvard professorship and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was his chief research collaborator.  Both lost their jobs in the light of their relationship with a younger woman called Olive Byrne, originally Marston’s research assistant.  The Marstons and Olive then became a ménage à trois in suburban New York.  Marston had four children, two with Elizabeth and two with Olive.  In the early 1940s, he began a remarkable second career, as the creator of Wonder Woman.  The two strong women in his own life are believed to have strongly influenced the development of his fictional superheroine.  The nature of the sexual relations that he, Elizabeth and Olive enjoyed is widely assumed to have inspired the motifs of domination, submission, bondage etc in the comic books that Marston authored.

    This life story is undoubtedly stranger than fiction though fiction is what parts of Angela Robinson’s version of it (which the paragraph above reflects) have been dismissed as, by Marston’s granddaughter Christie.  She is quoted on Wikipedia as follows:

    ‘[The] depiction of the family and Wonder Woman’s origins are made up. … [The film] is based on someone’s imagination not in any way related to my family. … The relationship between Gram [Elizabeth Marston] and Dots [Olive Byrne] is wrong; they were as sisters, not lovers. … [The film has] Marston presenting an idea for a female hero, and Elizabeth naysaying the idea, declaring that nobody would ever publish it. … [My grandfather] … discussed it with my grandmother. She said to go ahead and do it, but that it had to be a woman.’

    If Christie Marston’s objections are right, the last inaccuracy – implying that Marston didn’t himself think up a ground-breaking female superhero – is somewhat surprising.  Angela Robinson evidently wants to present Marston (Luke Evans) as a feminist ahead of his time:  his psychological research convinces him that women are more emotionally honest and, according to the DISC theory, in many respects more able than men; he champions feminist causes.  But not entirely surprising.  In pushing Marston’s feminism, Robinson gets into a bind because she also wants to portray Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) as a woman whose talents were stymied by contemporary constraints and conventions, including subservience to her husband.  At the start of the film, Elizabeth is angry that she’s considered ineligible for a master’s degree from Harvard and must be content with one from Radcliffe College instead.  After she and William have been fired and set up home with Olive (Bella Heathcote), Elizabeth supports the household through secretarial jobs unworthy (so Robinson suggests) of her gifts while Olive cares for the Marston children.  Other than in the bedroom, William appears to contribute little to the family, beyond bright ideas as to what to turn his hand to post-Harvard.   Since none of these has borne fruit, Elizabeth’s scornful reaction to Wonder Woman – the latest bright idea – is understandable.

    Robinson’s admiration for the main characters as pioneers of sexual unorthodoxy makes for a different problem.  She recognises the kinky comedy of the trio’s sadomasochistic experiments and occasionally does it justice but she’s reluctant fully to embrace this funny side, for fear of undermining William, Elizabeth and Olive.  This often looks like a film in search of a visual style and the tone is uncertain:  it’s not surprising that Tom Howe, who wrote the music, seems to have been under the impression that he was scoring a straight-faced biopic.  One thing that doesn’t change in cinema, however right on the attitudes of the film-maker, is the casting of beautiful people in sexually significant roles.  The tendency is understandable and, to be honest, makes for a more agreeable viewing experience but it can be counterproductive too.  In the case of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, it’s well before the obligatory closing photographs of the actual people involved that you suspect their dramatised counterparts are glamorised versions of them.  When the Marstons and Olive first get dressed up for dominance-and-submission role-play, it’s circa 1930 but Angela Robinson floods the soundtrack with Nina Simone singing Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s ‘Feeling Good’.  The anachronism of the music is compounded – and the impact of the sequence diluted – by what’s on screen.  The actors’ toned, modern look contradicts the idea that, to quote the ‘Feeling Good’ lyrics, ‘it’s a new world’ and that those sampling it are in bizarre terra incognita.

    The script sees Marston as both priapic and oddly innocent.  Luke Evans is very likeable but a little bland, and the innocence he suggests isn’t that of an absent-minded professor.  His characterisation  is thoughtful but Evans doesn’t project intelligence.  This feels wrong – even if we’re meant to think that Elizabeth has a more brilliant and original mind than William.  Marston’s mildly sexist badinage, as he lectures to a class of female students, elicits giggles from the girls, not, you feel, because they think the remarks suggestive but because their professor is a dreamboat.  The lavishly talented Rebecca Hall is more satisfying:  although she’s imposingly attractive, Hall makes Elizabeth a spiky bluestocking too.  There are moments, though, when the character’s situation and the actress’s seem to coincide – when what Hall is doing exposes the gulf between her abilities and the material she’s working with in an almost self-assertive way.  The beautiful Bella Heathcote is alert and expressive in her early scenes, touching later on:  it feels right that Olive gradually loses her bloom as she turns into a homemaker – albeit a homemaker extraordinaire.  The relationship between the two women seems more fully loving than the relationship either of them has with William.  There are good contributions in small roles from J J Feild, as the pioneering fetish merchant Charles Guyette, and Oliver Platt, as the comic-book publisher Max Gaines.

    The storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. The tentative direction deprives the narrative of momentum; as a result, it takes too long to get to the creation of Wonder Woman.  Robinson uses as a framework Marston’s appearance before a committee of the Child Study Association of America (CSAA).  The bulk of the story is technically a series of flashbacks from this interview but only technically:  the retrospection isn’t Marston’s – it’s just a way of dividing things up.  The CSAA is depicted (travestied?) here as a harsh moral watchdog, exercised by Marston’s provocative imagery and themes, concerned by their potentially pernicious effect on American youth.  But American youth appears already to have taken matters into its own hands:  at the start Robinson has shown Marston distressed to see children in his neighbourhood making a bonfire of Wonder Woman comics – before his grilling by the CSAA head Josette Frank.  (The casting of this character is an instance where an actor’s good looks make things more interesting.  It would have been so obvious to make Frank a frump:  as played by Connie Britton, she’s chic, as well as an incisive interrogator.)   As soon as Marston leaves the CSAA committee, he collapses with the illness that, in a few screen minutes’ time, will have proved fatal.  (Marston died of cancer.  Luke Evans is poorly served by the make-up department in the film’s 1947 scenes:  he doesn’t look much older or ill.)  Having hurriedly veered into standard biopic crisis territory, Angela Robinson stays there to effect an eleventh-hour reconciliation between the Marstons and Olive before William dies. (more…)

  • I Am Not a Witch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rungano Nyoni (2017)

    In an interview in Sight & Sound (November 2017), the writer-director Rungano Nyoni expresses her great admiration for Michael Haneke:  it’s apt that white ribbons are such an important image in Nyoni’s first feature I Am Not a Witch.   In Haneke’s film, set in the early twentieth century, the children of a Lutheran pastor are made to wear a white ribbon to remind them of their duty to be pure of heart.  Nyoni’s debut, set in present-day Zambia, also features a white-beribboned child but the material is a tie that binds in a more literal sense.  In the opening scene, a group of tourists visits a ‘witch farm’, where they observe a huddle of middle-aged and elderly women, their faces painted white, their bodies attached by white ribbons to a huge, single spool.  A guide explains that, if not restrained in this way, the women – they are witches after all – might fly away.  I Am Not a Witch soon becomes the story of eight-year-old Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), who is sent to join this company.

    Nyoni loses no time in suggesting the arbitrary nature of witchcraft accusations.  Shula is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In a largely deserted rural landscape, a woman carrying a pitcher of water trips, falls and spills her cargo.  Shula is standing nearby.  The woman decides that the girl put the evil eye on her.  The police officer (Nellie Munamonga) who investigates the incident is properly sceptical but Shula’s refusal either to confirm or deny the accusation poses a problem.   A white ribbon is attached to her clothing and she is given a choice:  either cut the ribbon and risk being transformed into a goat or leave the ribbon intact and join the witch farm.  She opts for the latter.  She is (on the evidence of the film but see last paragraph below) an exceptionally young witch and a politician singles her out for special treatment.  Mr Banda (Henry B J Phiri), Minister for Tourism and Traditional Beliefs, starts to exploit Shula’s potential for saving government money and boosting revenue.  He uses her alleged powers to settle civil cases in court.  He takes her onto a primetime television chat show – though it’s he who does all the talking there.

    The ‘Smooth Talk’ show sequence is one of the film’s several juxtapositions of ancient and modern, indigenous tradition and Western influences, in Zambian culture.  The members of the TV studio audience that has just enjoyed a rap performance look blankly or curiously at Shula when she and Banda come on stage.  The ‘coven’, although segregated from their families, can still have occasional contact with them and a witch’s daughter brings to the farm a supply of wigs, which the witches try on.  The hairpieces are named for the celebrities who inspired them – the daughter refers to them the Beyoncé or the Rihanna or the Kim Kardashian.  (The daughter speaks in an African dialect.  The English subtitles suggest, by misspelling these famous names, her idiosyncratic pronunciation of them.)  Shula spends time in Banda’s swanky home.  His wife Charity (Nancy Murilo), who lives and dresses in high style, explains that she herself once faced accusations of being a witch.  She emphasises to Shula the importance of becoming ‘respectable’ and shows off the Bandas’ chandeliers but the décor also includes a witch spool (like a giant cotton reel) and Charity is still expected to put a white ribbon on if she leaves the house.  The choice of European classical music on the soundtrack – a very deliberate choice, according to the S&S interview – supplies another cultural dichotomy.  Although this music seemed to me nothing more than strikingly incongruous, it may well be personally meaningful to Rungano Nyoni, born in Zambia and raised in Wales.  (She moved from Lusaka to live in Cardiff at the age of eight – Shula’s age.)

    The comedy – even though it’s troubling comedy – in these illustrations of culture clash helps lighten the film’s mood.   So does Banda, and with a similar caveat.  He is easily made to look foolish:  by the increasingly resistant and resourceful Shula; through his craven attitude in a meeting with tribal royalty; in his blustering condemnation of a phone-in caller to ‘Smooth Talk’, whose tricky question Banda dismisses as an abuse of freedom of speech.  He’s a vain buffoon but an influential one.  Nyoni also gets sarcastic humour out of tourist attitudes to Zambia’s witch ‘industry’– especially a cooing, sentimental white woman who tries to ‘cheer up’ Shula by taking her photograph.  I Am Not a Witch is lifted too by the sheer, controlled confidence of the filmmaking.  Those white ribbons are versatile in their texture and movement – lovely as they quiver in the wind, frightening as they’re pulled tight to thwart an attempted escape and the fugitive witch is dragged along the ground.  David Gallego’s cinematography gives the dusty, parched rural terrain an imposing severity.  The closing scene – in which the witches change from their usual blue-grey garb into red robes, to conduct a funeral service – has great visual impact.

    Since the witches are bidding farewell to Shula, this finale leaves no room for doubt that Rungano Nyoni’s story, in spite of its various amusements, is a fundamentally unhappy one.  On what appears to be the night before her death, Shula says that she regrets that, when she had the choice, she didn’t opt to cut the white ribbon – even if this had meant turning into a goat.  A goat, says Shula, can move about freely – though her older companions remind her it can be eaten too.  Although the style of the film is often realistic, there are points in the narrative where Nyoni eschews realism for the sake of what she judges a more important symbolism.  It isn’t made clear, for example, why Shula doesn’t protest, at the outset, that ‘I am not a witch’; but her reticence effectively conveys the message that women, perhaps especially girls, accused of witchcraft in the society Nyoni is describing don’t have a voice in fighting this cultural tyranny.  The director doesn’t explain either the circumstances of the young girl’s death but it makes symbolic sense to the extent that Shula is doomed (though the lack of explanation was still, to this viewer, frustrating).  Maggie Mulubwa completely satisfies what Nyoni surely wanted from the child playing Shula:  she’s engagingly individual yet, partly because she has so little say, eloquently representative.

    That last word reminds me that I doubt I’d have realised the setting was specifically Zambia, rather than ‘a sub-Saharan African country’, if I hadn’t read about the film beforehand.  The persistence of belief in witchcraft is strong across the sub-continent and I’m ignorant of the variations between countries in how this manifests itself.  As she recently made clear to the Guardian, Rungano Nyoni set out to excoriate not belief in witchcraft as such but its social consequences:  ‘It’s not the belief that I’m against, or that I question, because spooky things happen all the time in Zambia.  It’s that the witch accusations, are always aimed at older women or children. This is the bit I find absurd.’  Nyoni’s agnosticism enriches the film’s final sequence, in which rain suddenly starts to fall over the gathering of witches in mourning.  The downpour is long-needed:  Shula had been put under pressure to bring it about – in one scene, she was made to do a rain dance.   Is the opening of the heavens at her death a sarcastic irony or one of Nyoni’s ‘spooky things’ happening?  Either way, it makes for a beautiful closing image.

    9 November 2017

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