The Theory of Everything

Eddie Redmayne (The Yellow Handkerchief, My Week with Marilyn) shines as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in the blatantly award-seeking biopic, The Theory of Everything. The film chronicles the life of Hawking from his days as a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge to his world-wide fame as an author, a cosmologist, and arguably the most important physicist and scientific mind since Albert Einstein. While the picture is no masterpiece of cinema, it avoids many of the pitfalls of the tiresome biopic genre by taking the original tack of not making Hawking the main character in his own story. Rather than focus exclusively on the great thinker’s scientific accomplishments or his personal challenges with the motor neuron disease ALS, The Theory of Everything tells the love story between Hawking and his first wife. Indeed the film is based on Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen (2008) rather than Stephen Hawking’s memoir My Brief History (2013).

By telling the story through Jane’s eyes, she becomes the main character, and thus the film, while still a biopic, plays more like a 1950s “woman’s picture.” Director James Marsh and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme even shoot the period film in a lush, colorful, romantic style that is somewhat reminiscent of classic Hollywood melodramas like those made by the great Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). The film’s focus on the love story will surely be a disappointment for audiences looking for insight into Hawking’s groundbreaking work as a physicist, but I would argue that no biopic could satisfactorily convey those scientific specifics. (Viewers who want an in-depth film about Hawking and his theories can check out Errol Morris’ 1992 documentary A Brief History of Time). 

Unfortunately, audiences hoping for deep exploration of Hawking’s first love and unconventional first marriage may also be disappointed. The first half of the picture is fairly standard biopic fare. It tells the romantic story of Stephen and Jane’s courtship which becomes threatened (along with everything else in Hawking’s life) when the ALS diagnosis arrives. Though the life expectancy of someone with this disease in the 1960s was only two years, Jane marries Stephen and encourages him to live, work, and thrive, even as his body shuts down. After devoting a good deal of screen time to Stephen and Jane’s courtship, the movie doesn’t reveal much about the more intimate aspects of their marriage.  We move right from the stylized, 8mm home movie depiction of their wedding to a hasty montage that skips over the conception and birth of their first two children. It seems like the film isn’t going to explore any specific aspects of their marriage at all, as Hawking’s physical decline intensifies and we jump right into full-on disease-movie mode. But then the film introduces its third major character, the widower Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox). Jones enters the Hawking’s lives as a friend and helper and soon develops a chaste but reciprocated attraction to Jane.  Suddenly, the film becomes about this distinctive romantic triangle and the emotional complications that result. The second half of the picture feels even more like a good 1950s melodrama; dealing frankly and directly with sexual and relational dynamics, but in a decidedly tasteful and discreet manner. 

Marsh, known for documentary features like Man on Wire and Project Nim, creates a beautiful looking picture with two terrific performances at its center.  In the less showy role of Jane, Felicity Jones (Like Crazy, The Invisible Woman, The Amazing Spider-Man 2) is every bit as compelling as Redmayne. This is an impressively well-balanced and unsentimental romantic drama considering how easily Marsh could have overplayed the triumph-over-adversity aspect of Hawking’s true-life story. Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarten demonstrate wise restraint by not trying to make the definitive film about Steven Hawking. They clearly understand that narrative cinema is better suited to exploring the complexities of marriage than the mysteries of the universe. By simply telling an engaging story about a unique relationship, they largely avoid the all too common biographical trap of reducing an important life to a series of expected milestones. The Theory of Everything doesn’t completely overcome its genre handicaps, but its engaging love story goes a long way towards transcending its structural limitations.