The
theory about everything review: Film depicting the life of Professor Stephen
Hawking
IT is going to be a battle of the
boffins at the Oscars next year. Benedict Cumberbatch is a frontrunner for
playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and Eddie Redmayne will be a powerful
contender for his remarkable performance as Professor Stephen Hawking in The
Theory Of Everything.
Playing Hawking from PhD student
through to global superstardom as the author of A Brief History Of Time
Redmayne is outstanding, inhabiting Hawking’s stricken body and brilliant mind
with complete conviction.
In the same way that The Imitation
Game humanised an intimidatingly clever and remote figure so The Theory Of Everything reveals the
man behind the icon: courageous, mischievous, funny but also difficult and
selfish.
It may not be a warts-and-all portrait
(the picture is too genteel for that) but it’s a touching, humorous and
inspirational insight into a man who refused to accept conventional boundaries,
both of the mind and body.
We’re reminded quite how extraordinary
it is that he’s still alive (now 72) when a doctor informs him, while at
Cambridge University, that he has only two years to live. Told that his body
will shut down as Motor Neurone Disease destroys his muscle function, Stephen
asks about his brain. The doctor (Adam Godley) explains that it will continue
to function normally but adds: “No one will know what your thoughts are.” The
great mind will have no way to communicate.
Most people would have thrown in the
towel and perhaps Stephen would have done were it not for Jane Wilde (a
wonderful Felicity Jones), the girlfriend who refused to give up on him or let
him give up.
Petite and seemingly demure she’s
determined and quietly tenacious and the film is as much about her as it is
Hawking. The screenplay by Anthony McCarten is based on her memoir, Travelling
To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, and it’s their relationship which resulted
in three children but ended in divorce that forms the heart of the story along
with the role played by family friend and Jane’s eventual second husband,
bashful choirmaster Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox).
This potentially messy state of
affairs is handled with great delicacy and is the source of the picture’s
fascination, heart and charm. It’s some achievement: what might have seemed
uncomfortable and intrusive is actually moving, tender and sweet.
The result is a very British love
story between three people, all extraordinary in their own way, who are trying
to find happiness and fulfilment in the most trying of circumstances. We don’t
get wild explosions or tantrums or declarations of love but mostly silent,
dignified struggle and unspoken desire.
Initially we witness the love affair
between Hawking and Jane who meet at Cambridge and strike up an instant rapport
at a party despite having little in common. She’s a student of medieval Spanish
poetry and a firm believer in God, he’s a “cosmologist” which he describes as a
“religion for intelligent atheists”.
Still, love conquers all against the
backdrop of a firework display during a May Ball where they kiss. On paper it
sounds very Hollywood and their courtship is seductively staged and performed
but the pair are winningly British and their conversation is hardly the stuff
of your average Hollywood romance. They natter about quantum physics, God and
Einstein.
Hawking explains his ambition to discover an “equation that explains
everything in the universe” as he begins to explore his fascination with
“time”.
The scientific talk is cleverly
handled with some imaginative visual cues like cream swirling in a coffee cup.
We may not understand the details but the general gist is clear as Hawking
makes some ground-breaking discoveries
into the origins of the universe.
In any case it’s not the science that
compels or intrigues; we know the man’s a genius. What we don’t know is the
personal story behind the work and the rather strange and testing family life
endured by his wife who for years was denied help by her husband. “We’re just a
normal family,” he insists. Read
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