From the opening minutes of The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne has you in his hands, expertly playing a young Stephen Hawking in the early 1960s, studying cosmology at Cambridge University. Then, just as soon as we meet Hawking, we’re introduced to Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), the young woman that would become his first wife. Benefiting the film greatly, director James Marsh (Man on Wire) allows us some time with the couple before turning the focus to the dramatic revelation of Hawking’s motor neurone disease and the two years he’s told he has left to live.
As we all know, Hawking has more than exceeded the two year timeline and, according to a Q&A that followed my screening of the film, Hawking shed a tear after seeing the movie, saying it’s “broadly true”. It would also seem he gave the film his blessing by loaning his voice, as it is heard now via a computer program. Of course, like pretty much all crowd-pleasing biopics, this one deviates from the truth when it comes to the darker elements of Stephen and Jane’s relationship, which makes for a film that’s easier to swallow, but it’s not too hard to see through the false front.
Based on Jane Hawking‘s memoir “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen“, Theory of Everything is just about as perfectly composed as a biopic can get if the goal is to appeal to a wide audience — a well-told drama that’s romantic, filled with emotional highs and not-so-low lows as well a smattering of humor. It’s the perfect crowd-pleaser and it’s helped out immensely by stand-out performances from Redmayne and Jones, both at the absolute top of their game.
I don’t know if the credit goes to Marsh or screenwriter Anthony McCarten, but the most important factor to the film’s success are the first 20 minutes or so, before Hawking is diagnosed with a swiftly advancing form of ALS. It’s here that Redmayne builds his character and allows us to connect with Hawking’s wit, intelligence, excitement for his work and the relationships he has with his friends and family. He and Jones convince us of the love the two have for one another so that once Hawking is confined to a wheelchair with slurred speech and eventually relying on a machine to do his talking for him, you already know the man he is, adding emotional weight to everything that comes after. Too often films such as this become focused on the disease and not the person, Theory of Everything is not such a film.
As much as Redmayne deserves credit for his performance and is sure to be an Oscar frontrunner, the success of his character also belongs to everyone around him including his Cambridge professor played by David Thewlis and his best friend played by Harry Lloyd. The heaviest lifting, however, belongs to Jones. Her portrayal of Jane, offers us a woman with a strong love for Hawking, but also one that is progressively overwhelmed with a sense of duty toward her husband as well as the limitations placed on her life as a result of her marriage. This being a biopic, however, it never delves too deeply into, or focuses too intensely on, the down moments in their relationship, preferring to stay upbeat whenever possible.
I’m sure living with Hawking, needing to care for him day in and day out, couldn’t possibly have been a treat for Jane, especially with three children and her pursuit of a PhD of her own. The film only passingly looks at this aspect of their relationship, preferring to focus more on the mutual struggle than the individual frustrations. In this way it’s incredibly uplifting, inspiring and will likely result in cheers from most audiences that see it, but it still isn’t anything more than a traditional biopic, elevated only by its performances and our knowledge of the real world struggles Hawking faced and still does to this day. Only now, after seeing this movie, a version of Jane’s story can be added to the mix.
To be fair, biopics, and all movies for that matter, should be judged for what they are rather than what they aren’t, and in these terms I quite enjoyed The Theory of Everything. The story is fascinating and the performances excellent. However, the rather puritanical nature of the storytelling keeps the movie from being as great as the performances within it. There’s a harsh reality to Stephen Hawking’s story that would have turned this into a far more emotionally complex story, but I understand the goal wasn’t to delve too deep into those aspects, preferring to keep the story in a comfort zone more tolerable to a wider range of audience members. I get it, and it’s a good film as is, but I believe it could have been great.
