★★★☆☆
Three stars
On the surface, The Theory of Everything ticks a lot of boxes for forthcoming success in the movie awards season: an able-bodied actor playing a disabled character, a plot about an underdog who succeeds in the face of all the odds, a personal drama flecked with existential questions about creation and the nature of the universe. It’s a truly exotic mixture of domestic turmoil, the acute reality of disability and supernovas.
The film charts the remarkable life of Professor Stephen Hawking, the physicist known for his pioneering theories about the universe’s origins and his lifelong battle against motor neurone disease. Constructed as a chronological tale that follows Hawking from his days as an awkward Cambridge graduate through to international scientific superstar, the plot covers in equal measure his personal battles. It not only covers Hawking’s attempts to prove a diagnosis of a two year life expectancy wrong, but also the struggles his wife confronts in the face of a husband who is physically degenerating.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%10760%%[/mm-hide-text]
The film is foremost a performance-driven piece, and these struggles between husband and wife are brought to life by the captivating central performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Jones brings tremendous emotional credibility to the character of Jane Hawking, who is burdened with the realities of her husband’s burgeoning success. Whilst Stephen enjoys worldwide academic acclaim, Jane is confronted with the mundane exigencies of everyday life: clothing, washing, feeding and caring for a husband in a worsening physical state. Caught between an inescapable sense of hopelessness and the perpetual drive to see Stephen carry on, Jones brilliantly and subtly captures the role of a woman whose life becomes dominated by her spouse.
Of course, Redmayne’s towering portrayal is the film’s central talking point, and it is joyous, in parts, to watch. Throughout, the uncanniness of Redmayne’s performance is striking, from the physical twitches, to the facial contortions, down to eye movements and blinks. It is a performance driven by nuance, which never strays into parody, gratuity or distaste. Yet, it is the earlier scenes, of Stephen as a still able-bodied graduate in Cambridge that were the most entrancing. There was something particularly magical about viewing a side of Stephen Hawking none of us would ever have seen or even imagined him as – a socially clumsy, fantastically intelligent and charming university student. Factual accuracy aside, Redmayne perfectly captures an imagined version of Hawking in his youth, and those scenes in Cambridge towards the beginning of the film were by far the most enthralling.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%10762%%[/mm-hide-text]
Yet, there was something deeply incongruous about these brilliant central performances and the film’s numerous flaws. For one, though the performances bring tremendous emotional clout to the personal side of Hawking’s life, the script dumbs down his scientific achievements to a gallingly infantile degree. If there were more than four sentences describing what major breakthroughs in physics Hawking pioneered, I would be surprised. I understand his work to be immensely complex, but I entirely doubt his leading theoretical work about radiation emitted by a black hole is best explained by drawing a spiral in beer foam on a pub table.
Equally, for a film that attempts to chart an enormous, perhaps too large, chunk of Hawking’s life, scenes meant to symbolise the passing of time were done remarkably ineffectually. The montages disguised as vintage home-movie clips, shot in an almost Instragram-filter-esque homage to 1980’s handheld camcorder footage, were particularly naff and felt deeply out of place with the rest of the film’s beautiful, and measured, cinematography. The all-too-frequent use of these scarcely disguised sequences only served to highlight that the script couldn’t tackle so much of a very eventful life.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%10763%%[/mm-hide-text]
Moreover, the script quickly became formulaic, with these passing-of-time moments often used to break up the repeated sequence of academic advance tarnished by a personal setback. Whether that was Stephen gaining a PhD, yet simultaneously resigning himself to life in a wheelchair, or the publishing of A Brief History of Time, set against him contracting pneumonia and subsequently losing the ability to speak, the script was cyclical to the point of tedium.
And although these personal dramas were effectively realised, it was hard to feel compassion for Jane in these moments. Though acted well by Jones, Jane as a character came across as perpetually frigid and dislikeable; hardly the sympathy-inducing persona the film was trying to fit her into. Equally, her falling in love with family-friend-turned-assistant-carer Jonathan was rendered so blandly that it was hard to feel anything at all for either of them, besides a sense of curiosity as to why the film had dedicated so much time to that side story.
When compared to that other cinematic depiction of genius out at the moment, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything is the better film. It is more nuanced in its central depiction, more emotionally evocative without straying into crass sentimentality and far more carefully constructed. Yet, both films suffer from the exact same flaw; inadequate scripts that only serve to impair truly remarkable acting performances.
