The Theory of Everything
Opens Friday at Tampa Theatre and other theaters Nov. 26.
Directed by James Marsh. Stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones.
focusfeatures.com/the_theory_of_everything
Biopics are often a mixed bag. Too many scripts suffer under the weight of too many life events and awkward prosthetics crammed into a 90-or-so-minute movie. Some of the best ones are as amazing as they are expansive — Gandhi, Amadeus or The Last Emperor. Others examine a specific period of a lifetime — The King’s Speech, Capote. With The Theory of Everything, we get the less-is-more type, based on Jane Hawking’s memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, and directed by Oscar-winner James Marsh (Man on Wire). Theory illuminates but leaves you wanting to know more.
Director Marsh, who demonstrated a knack for humanizing radical heroes with his documentary about tight-wire artist Philippe Petit, takes an intimate look at two decades in the life of famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne), and his marriage to Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), a language and literary scholar, who was as devoted to the Church of England as she was to her atheist husband. Marsh artfully travels back in time to 1963, to Stephen Hawking’s graduate years, when he meets Jane and is diagnosed with ALS (known in England as motor-neuron disease).
Marsh makes the element of time a crucial, secondary character of sorts, paying respects to his subject’s life’s purpose — to discover that one equation that explains the origin of the universe. He shows us 1963 with a Kodachrome-like lens, using muted colors that convince us that the study halls and centuries-old pillars of Cambridge University must only be viewed in soft earth tones. As time goes, by the colors gradually get sharper, but remain short of what we see in the here and now.
We first get to know the author of A Brief History of Time as a sprightly, nerdy young man reared in a household of academics. His snarky younger siblings scramble to the dinner table with paperbacks like Lord of the Flies in hand. He meets pretty liberal arts student Jane, whose upbringing is as staid and proper as her name. Differences aside, Jane sets her sights on Stephen and stays by his side after doctors tell him he has only two years to live. (Hawking is 72 now.) Though the film comes from the perspective of a spouse, Jane Hawking is too intelligent and individualistic to disappear into the background. Her Jane is a lovely composite of contradictions, and Felicity Jones brings her to life with both grace and power.
Redmayne’s Oscar-contender buzz is completely deserved. He neither milks it nor lapses into caricature. His spirited gaze and unrelenting contortions are on point. Redmayne portrays Hawking as a man of unbelievable power amidst the throes of an incurable, debilitating disease. “However bad life may seem, where there is life there is hope,” Hawking says, and Redmayne makes us believe it.
According to an interview in Buzzfeed, Redmayne teamed up with dancer-choreographer Alexandra Reynolds (World War Z), and met with doctors, nurses and patients at the Queen Square Centre for Neuromuscular Disease in London. The 32-year-old actor said that he learned how ALS affects patients differently. Some experience the loss of “upper” neurons, which causes the affected areas to fix into a rigid shape, and “lower” neurons, which causes the body to go loose and limp. Redmayne used archival photos and whatever he could find on YouTube to deduce Hawking’s unique set of symptoms — with the help of the doctors at Queen Square who rendered “a loose sort of diagnosis.” In short, Redmayne did his homework.
While the plot feels a little lacking midway through, focusing a little too long on Jane’s ambiguous crush on a choir director, we’re reminded that Theory isn’t a by-the-numbers film. The struggles that the Hawkings endure, beyond Stephen’s ALS, are fairly commonplace and tackled with unsentimental honesty.
One of the film’s foremost accomplishments is its ability to be heartrending without resorting to maudlin overtures. That’s not to say Theory’s too dry, either; when we see Hawking envisioning himself emerging from a chair to pick up a dropped pen at one of his public speaking engagements, we get a lovely, poetic look at his longing, and experience a connection with a genius who would otherwise be beyond our scope of comprehension.
And speaking of the incomprehensible, the once-babyfaced girl next door Emily Watson gives a memorable turn as Jane’s stodgy mum, reminding us once again about the passage of time.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2014.