A story of disillusionment and lost innocence, of vain ambition and bitter victory, Patty Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman” is a movie told in flashback, starting with its heroine, Diana (Gal Gadot), doing curatorial work in the present day beneath the Louvre’s glass pyramid. Soon enough, she gets called to the past, by an archival photograph delivered to her under careful wraps by Bruce Wayne’s delivery service. The photo shows her and four men, and comes with a note asking her for the story behind it. The rest of the movie is devoted to her recollection of that story—of her story, from her childhood through the exploits and friendships that the long-lost photo commemorates.
Yet its story of ruefulness and loss isn’t smothered in gray existential sludge poured down from on high in the style of Christopher Nolan. Instead, those qualities emerge on their own from the events of the film, which are depicted with a calm and clear frankness that Jenkins builds into her view of Diana’s story from the start. Of course, “Wonder Woman” is a superhero movie, and it fulfills the heroic and mythic demands of that genre, but it’s also an entry in the genre of wisdom literature that shares hard-won insights and long-pondered paradoxes of the past with a sincere intimacy.
That tone of modest and restrained clarity is, above all, what distinguishes “Wonder Woman” from the run of thudding, drubbing, thrashing action scenes in other, male-centered superhero movies. “Wonder Woman” ’s spare simplicity also renders the underlying framework of its ideas and its principles starkly visible through the surfaces of its action. It’s a good-humored film (my colleague Anthony Lane calls attention to its genial riffs) that features stirring displays of martial courage, wit, and skill, but, above all, it’s a coherent film, in which Jenkins says what she wants to say with clear but ample and generous means. The director doesn’t tailor the film tightly to her ideas but lets them fill a wide yet well-defined cinematic field, which is why its coherence also seems unusually warm, humane, and hearty. That sharpness of purpose is as much a part of the movie’s identity as is the enduring character at its center, and, for that matter, the instantly iconic embodiment of that character by Gadot.
“Wonder Woman” is the story of a young woman who is brought up under extraordinary circumstances. As a child, Diana, raised on the isolated island of Themyscira, the home of the Amazons, women and warriors all, wants to learn to fight. Her mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen), wants to keep her apart from that trade, but the willful Diana gets her way and is trained by her aunt Antiope (Robin Wright) to be a supreme warrior. Now an adult (played, of course, by Gadot), she rescues an American airman, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), from the sea—and the island is soon besieged by German soldiers in pursuit of him. It turns out that Diana has become unwittingly involved in the First World War; when she extracts Steve’s story from him (by way of the burning-hot lasso of truth, something between truth serum and torture), she learns that he is attempting to thwart the production and use of poison gas by Germany against soldiers and civilians. Persuaded that his cause is just, she sneaks off the island with him, goes with him to London, and joins the battle.
Gadot achieves a rare synthesis with the character of Diana; as directed by Jenkins, she brings out Diana’s essential contrast of innocence and purpose, consummate skill as a warrior and tragic naïveté in its deployment. Raised in isolation both from males and from mankind at large, learning of the world from legends enshrined in religion and accorded the force of truth, Diana believes that all strife and evil is due to the influence of one miscreant, Zeus’s jealous son Ares, the god of war, and joins Steve’s mission in the belief that the German mastermind behind the poison gas, General Ludendorff (played by Danny Huston), is the human incarnation of Ares. Kill Ludendorff, she thinks, and end all war. For Diana, her role in Steve’s mission is literally to wage the war to end all wars.
Of course, that plan doesn’t work out any better for Diana than it did for mankind over all. But the ingenuity of their exploits and the bravery of their adventures—as well as the horrors of the battlefield and the bureaucratic blundering (and worse) that goes on in the back offices—form a classic war story that highlights the test of character in battle and the deep bonds that are forged in the face of death, as well as the waste of lives, the physical and emotional traumas, the wanton destruction, the ideological delusions, and, ultimately, the futility of war.
The first flash of Diana’s supernatural powers, while sparring on Themyscira, is a joyful shock—she touches the metal plaques of her forearm shields together and sparks a mighty explosion that might have surprised even her with its devastating, nearly catastrophic effectiveness. After arriving in London (and clashing comedically with local manners), she and Steve and his wild bunch of three marginal commandos set out for the battlefield, where Jenkins displays Diana’s fighting in two main forms: bullets come toward her in extreme slow motion, and she swats them away with her armor; and she makes martial-arts leaps toward her enemies, which get slowed down mid-leap before resuming their natural speed.
In the film’s handful (an unusually scant handful) of warfare scenes, Jenkins doesn’t offer many variations on these two fighting modes; her modesty of style isn’t quite a modest style, nor one of conspicuously aestheticized restraint, like that of Jim Jarmusch or Sofia Coppola. Rather, it’s a style that displays neither its passion nor its reserve, and comes close to the realistic style of no style, as if in fear that a heightened or aestheticized one would ultimately contradict the point of the film and serve as a glorification of the very violence that it repudiates. It’s a superhero film with almost no excess.
Even though Diana’s own battle skills are the peg for the movie’s action (and her fierce emergence from a trench to take on the Germans in no man’s land is one of the movie’s signal moments of uninhibited martial glory), it’s the fighting done by Steve and his human cohorts—warriors who lack Diana’s superhuman skills and, as a result, have to deploy a wide and varied range of human wiles—offers more cinematic fodder for Jenkins’s imagination. The movie’s one great action moment is a scene that brings together Steve’s tactical insight and Diana’s mighty abilities. The Fervent Five pursue Ludendorff to the Belgian village of Veld; there, they and the villagers come under siege from a German sniper who’s holed up in the bell tower of a church, and Steve comes up with a plan. Using a detached car door, he, Sammy, and Charlie provide Diana with a launching pad to catapult her up to the tower. The resulting mayhem is instantaneous and sublime; it’s also the movie’s most ecstatic and tightly packed symbolic moment, the one that illuminated the entire viewing experience, retroactively and through the rest of the action.
Pardon my spoiler, but the church tower is magnificently devastated, and the town is saved. I was surprised by the visual idea that destroying a church proved decisively redemptive; of course, what Diana and the men destroy, however, isn’t religion as such but weaponized religion. That scene illuminated a strange moment earlier in the film, during Steve’s flashback to his espionage mission in the Ottoman Empire, where he infiltrates and wages covert warfare directly under the crescent-and-star flag. At first, I was struck by echoes of (and even sordid justifications for) recent American adventurism in the Middle East; but the church scene made clear that “Wonder Woman” is harsh not on religion but on its weaponization. For that matter, “Wonder Woman” is as harsh on the weaponization of paganism as it is on that of latter-day monotheistic religions. One of Diana’s own great and painful discoveries is that the underlying and crucial doctrine of the belief system in which she was raised—the foundational evil of Ares, and the centrality of defeating Ares in the hope of restoring a lost paradise of peace—is both false and delusional. Diana discovers that her entire life’s mission is built on a lie, and that her great battle was undertaken in vain.
Her mythological heritage proves delusional in another way, as well: even as she was brought up with an abiding, principled love of humanity at large, she had been brought up with a sense that men over all were to be shunned, and without a notion of the particular virtues—and particular vices—of individual men. The very notion of an Amazonian island—of isolation and segregation—comes off, in the light of experience, as a narrowing and blinkering background. Diana’s experience in war alongside Steve offers tests and trials from which emerges the kind of mutual recognition, forged in the heat of action, that becomes her first experience of romantic love. Yet, because it’s a love forged in war, it’s a doomed love, a love poisoned by death—which Jenkins crowns with an unambiguously if crudely Wagnerian Liebestod.
The framing of “Wonder Woman” as a retrospective tale of flashbacks injects the story directly into the events of the present day. The movie was conceived and filmed long before the election (though there were some November reshoots), but it meshes with the sombre post-electoral world in some conspicuous ways. Diana sees a single monster as the sole obstacle to a world of peace and justice, and she seeks to defeat him. But, first, the effort turns out to involve the vanquishing of two monsters—one of whom comes from abroad and the other of whom is near at hand. Even then, the effort proves to be in vain—evil, she learns, isn’t instilled by overtly monstrous villains but arises within humankind itself, and the resistance to it requires something far greater, and harder to conceive, than a military response.
“Wonder Woman” is a tale of transmission, of wisdom passed down from generation to generation, from woman to woman, and from individual women to society at large—for those in society at large who are able to hear and heed it. It’s a visual tale of oral history, an allegory that cuts both ways: even as the segregation of women on Themyscira sends Diana into the world with a narrowed view of humankind, male-dominated human society at large, which keeps women largely out of power and cultural authority, keeps itself stultified, blinded, ignorant, oppressive, violent, warmongering. This, too, is part of the film’s exemplary present-day framework, both dramatic and ideological. Diana isn’t a warrior to end all wars, she’s a warrior to warn against wars—and against the parochial, self-enclosed island doctrines which are employed to justify them. In her work at the Louvre, she cultivates not just her own garden but a garden for humanity at large.
