What is it about film awards and biopics about damaged geniuses? Movies like ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ ‘Shine,’ ‘My Left Foot’ ‘Amadeus,’ and ‘Immortal Beloved’ seem tailor-made for actors to display their versatility so as to win recognition. Not that these stories do not deserve to be told -- on the contrary such tales of tragedy and triumph not only relate biographies of very special people whose very lives and achievements ennoble the human race (whose acts of avaricious grubbiness have been so consistently shocking that society seems almost desensitized of late to outrage and horror), they introduce entire aspects of occupational and artistic endeavor that might otherwise be ignored by our current vacuous, fabricated monoculture.
It’s just that the movie industry can’t seem to understand that audiences occasionally can get too much of a good thing, and too much of anything – be they superhero epics, science fiction / action / adventure franchises or inspirational biopics in a row not only tend to wear thin on audience patience, they can be perceived as downright insulting to viewer intelligence. “Just because ‘Gladiator’ won ‘Best Picture’ doesn’t mean we want to watch three films a year where the hero wears a costume and spouts portentous dialogue (alas both Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott found this out with ‘Alexander,’ ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and ‘Robin Hood’ – all movies who went to the well once too often). Even ‘Lincoln,’ with a magnificent performance by Daniel Day-Lewis at its heart veers into trite, turgid melodrama whenever he’s off screen (which, mercifully, is not often).
It was therefore with some trepidation that one approached 2014’s, ‘The Theory of Everything.’ Though a welcome surprise for anyone looking for a potentially intellectual film in today's metaphorical movie desert, initial trailers had a distinctly ‘Tinseltown’ feel to them, emphasizing cloying romance, trite quotes and raising alarm bells of the “love redeems all” tropes that contain more saccharine than unrefined sugar. How many films of that sort have there been -- all sizzle and no steak (ahem 'The Imitation Game')? One did not feel the compunction to pay the exorbitant price of a ticket only to be let down by contrived plots and by-the-numbers scripting.
By way of background, in case one has been living under a rock or a theme park without access to normal communications media, Stephen Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist (think of a job where there's so little factual information that one has to make huge theoretical leaps of speculative logic and then work out the mathematical proof afterwards). He survived motor neurone disease (expected to kill him in his twenties), became a pioneer in the arcane yet immensely important study of black holes, a best-selling author (‘A Brief History of Time’) and likely the world’s most famous wheelchair rider. Along the way he became a global icon, whose personal courage, triumph of the will and intellect has already been subjected to many monographs, magazine articles, and an excellent 2004 television treatment with a mesmerizing performance by none other than Benedict Cumberbatch.
Despite all this, Hawking is a contemporary hero, which are sadly in such short supply these days, and anything about him is worth at least a glance. Thus, three years after its theatrical release, it was time to see if all the hype surrounding 'Theory of Everything' was just that - hype.
These concerns were unfounded. This is an unexpectedly charming, moving and well-acted film. Working from a revised and abridged memoir of their marriage written by his ex-wife, Jane , screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh made a huge effort to avoid many, if not quite all, of the clichés about all-too-human geniuses, and by so doing fashioned a startlingly grown-up portrait of a challenging, troubled relationship. ‘The Theory of Everything’ (let’s call it ‘TOE,’ for short) strives for more reality than a regular “run of the mill” biopic, true and intimate in its study of the compromises made within a marriage with unique (and more customarily prosaic) pressures.
Stage actor Eddie Redmayne’s interpretation of Hawking is suffused with simplicity, candour and easy charm borne of charismatic intelligence. He does not overplay the remarkable nature of Hawking’s survival into middle age (and beyond), subtly suggesting how this was partly due in response to his wife’s devotion to him. Yet the film also hints that it may well have been the very nature of the discoveries themselves that have kept him alive, allowing for his own suggestion that the illness transformed him from a wayward, rudderless, callow youth into a Davros (for you Dr. Who fans) – like pure cerebral force of nature, almost as much machine as he is man all the while his fragile frame had to bear daunting emotional burdens he cannot possibly express.
Redmayne’s performance really soars when Hawking’s near fatal bout with pneumonia results in an emergency tracheotomy which deprives him of what is left of his power of speech. Somehow, the actor is able to show how the famous electronic voice box (amusingly American-accented) in a way both recreates and liberates the scientist, enabling him to take on the pixyish, playful, larger-than-life personality that we have come to be so familiar with -- and how, in an ironic way that synthetic voice, with its strangely melodic, sing-song robotic tone, also enigmatically serves to conceal what the man who formulates the words which gives voice to his thoughts is really thinking and feeling. The film implies that while Jane Wilde marries her tragic Romeo out of love, she never really comes to know him, but only to grasp at the essence that he once was as a younger man before his rebirth as both a modern oracle and cultural demigod.
The Hawkings’ basic story has already been well recounted in the Cumberbatch TV film as well as in ‘Hawking,’ a recent documentary by Stephen Finnigan: the brilliant yet undisciplined and unfocused young mathematician at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the early 1960s starts to make a name for himself, but also shows a foreshadowed tendency to clumsiness -- stumbling, knocking over mugs of tea, dropping pencils, initially could be seen as just scatter-brained conduct expected of British academia’s eccentrics. But one day a bone-jarring (and horribly realistic) fall brings with a grim diagnosis: Hawking has MND and a very short time to “put his affairs in order.” Girlfriend Jane, refuses to give up on him. They marry, have children; the mortality death sentence comes and goes, Hawking’s reputation continues to climb.
We’ve seen this before: the ‘Man of Destiny’ falls, rises and triumphs -- Icarus dives and soars again. Here the filmmakers can’t quite overcome the standard set pieces and stock characters , with brainy-looking, slightly off, blandly good-looking guys in tweed jackets, worn khakis and pulled-down ties scrawling wild-looking mathematics equations on blackboards (or anything else they can find, for that matter), downing pints of foamy ‘something’ in the pub and trying to put the moves on girls -- just as we saw in ‘A Beautiful Mind.’
Where the film sharply veers from the mundane is in delineating with surprising maturity just how Stephen and Jane slowly converted their “conventional” marriage into something like an open relationship. Frustrated and depressed, Jane forms an intense, friendship with the church choirmaster and widower, Jonathan Hellyer Jones, played by Charlie Cox, who even becomes something of a caregiver, joining family holidays, and helping Stephen as if he were one of the children. It is a situation in which Stephen is outwardly complaisant. Or is he? Soon he himself forms a similar, quasi-platonic relationship with his nurse, Elaine Mason, played by Maxine Peake, which is as intimate, or more so, than the dynamics of the conjugal bed. She does not hesitate to assert a kind of marital primacy over Stephen. Is Stephen’s eventual choice governed by emotional pain at Jane's relationship? It is another mystery.
Though Cox and Peake offer able support with small (and somewhat one-dimensional) roles it’s the powerful, subsurface ambiguous dynamic between Redmayne, whose performance gets more remarkably intense as the film goes on until he virtually inhabits the Hawking character with eerie emulation, and Felicity Jones who plays Jane with a ferocious, fierce, yet subtle determination. Jones, for her porcelain, delicate English looks and Oxford upper-class accent and elocution, is not an emotionally resonant actress whose performances are of the kind that reach out, grabs you by the lapels and worries you like a cat with a rat. Yet, much like Jyn Erso in ‘Star Wars – Rogue One’, her most recent other high-profile role, it’s the very juxtaposition between her delicate appearance and enigmatic assurance that infuses her performances with such conviction.
In this very complex portrayal of relationships, ‘TOE’ is definitely very un-Hollywood formulaic, though it feels strangely, rather English -- all sublimated and stiff upper (if quivering) lips. Redmayne, Jones, Cox and Peake portray the principals and their emotional interrelationships with delicacy. The title refers to Hawking’s quest for an all-encompassing theory of the physical universe which seeks to meld the theory of relativity (or the study of the very large) with quantum mechanics (the study of the very small), but it is the dichotomy of the film’s mature message that in ordinary life, not everything can be made to fit and make sense. Compromises must be made; people must muddle through, life must be lived.
At the film's end, it is clear that, for they have been through, Jane and Stephen Hawking still very much love each other in their own, unique way. Though this is not a conventional, happy ending, 'The Theory of Everything' relates an elegiac, gentle, tender story of people who fell in love and found friendship during and after their marriage.