Biopic lacks its own theory of everything

FILM
The Theory of Everything (PG)
3.5 stars
Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones
DIRECTOR JAMES MARSH
REVIEW MARK NAGLAZAS

Even though James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic is one of a group of Oscar- nominated movies based on true stories (along with The Imitation Game, American Sniper, Foxcatcher and Selma) it has largely escaped the fierce fact checking that has become an integral part of award hostilities.

Some have expressed irritation at the filmmaker’s choice not to adapt Jane Wilde Hawking’s controversial warts-and-all 1999 memoir Music to Move the Stars, in which she revealed graphic details about the daily grind of washing, clothing and feeding her increasingly imperious husband, rather than the softer, more forgiving follow-up Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen.

And one scallywag expressed disappointment that Marsh did not include a scene in which life-long socialist Hawking ran over the toes of Prince Charles in his wheelchair (he also had Margaret Thatcher in his sights).

Nor did they touch on the cosmologist’s penchant for strip joints.

But complaints about The Theory of Everything whitewashing Hawking’s life have not really stuck.

Much of the difficult material is touched on in this very comprehensive movie, from his cheeky personality and his eye for the ladies through to his marriage difficulties, his wife’s affair with a fellow member of the local church, and the scientist’s own infidelities.

While sticking to the facts is gratifying in an age of cine-hagiography, it also makes for a somewhat dull, one-dimensional movie, in which there is little attempt to draw a connection between Hawking’s theory’s about the origins of the universe, the nature of time, and so forth, and his life. (Compare this to the bold interpretation of Alan Turing’s life in The Imitation Game).

Indeed, the film doesn’t really attempt to cover the evolution of his thinking or explain his Earth-shaking ideas that would later be encapsulated in his mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, the least-read blockbuster book of all time (you’d be better off downloading Errol Morris’ 1991 documentary of the same name).

What the movie does do well is humanise a man who has replaced Albert Einstein as the symbol of scientific genius, re-attaching a body to the word’s biggest brain by taking us back before he was struck down with motor neurone disease, when he was just like any other fun-loving, skirt-chasing university student, through to his later years when he retained a roving eye.

Astutely, Marsh cuts from Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) doing burnouts on his wheelchair in Buckingham Palace after receiving an honour from the Queen to Cambridge in the 1960s, with the vital young student tearing through the ancient university town on another set of wheels — a bicycle.

He’s wearing those famously oversized spectacles and is as skinny and dorky as we would have imagined him to be.

But young Stephen is fearless as he flies along the winding roads through almost-closed gates and ends up at a boozy social event bopping along to Martha and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave.

“What if the theory of the universe had something to do with sex? The physics of love. Why not do a doctorate on love?” asks one of Hawking’s colleagues, moments before he claps myopic eyes on the gorgeous arts student Jane Wilde (Felicty Jones).

Even though he’s an atheist seeking a single unifying equation to explain the universe, and she a devout Anglican, the pair hit it off, sending them on a sparkling Woody Allen-ish romance, replete with heartbeat- quickening showground rides, gazes up at the star-filled night sky, and jazz on the soundtrack.

Motor neurone diseases strikes Hawking while he is still at university but it does not prevent him from completing his PhD, which blows away his examiners (including his inspiration, Roger Penrose) with his theory that time had a beginning, nor does it stop him marrying Jane and kicking off the legendary career as the man most likely to explain life’s greatest mysteries.

The strength of The Theory of Everything is that Marsh and his screenwriter, New Zealand novelist Anthony McCarten, devote as much time to the struggles of Jane as those of her husband, revealing that behind the disabled genius is a woman who kept him clean, clothed and fed as well has giving him three children.

The film also deals frankly, yet tastefully, with Jane’s relationship with a handsome family friend Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox), a choirmaster in her local Anglican church who becomes involved in Hawking’s care, and later with Hawking’s own affair with his nurse Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake), who becomes his second wife.

All of this material is presented with skill and subtlety, albeit a bit one-sidedly when dealing with Mason, who is shown as a bit of a gold-digger.

But what the film lacks is exactly what the scientist is seeking himself, a theory of everything, a theme binding together Hawking’s ideas and his life, not an air-tight thesis but something to lift it above the level of a competent docu-drama.

Marsh and McCarten reach for the giddiness and poignancy of Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a far superior film about a similarly locked-in dynamo, by including a moment in which Hawking imagines himself leaving his wheelchair mid-lecture to pick up a fallen pencil.

And Marsh’s attempts to make up for the script’s lack of a strong centre by using an Errol Morris- inspired montage, and Philip Glass-style minimalist classical music to give the impression of Hawking’s life as a compressed series of moments is lovely but not quite enough to anchor the movie.

What cannot be faulted is the astonishing performance of Redmaye, who in the later stages of The Theory of Everything communicates the intelligence, the wit, the high spirits and the carnality of Hawking, even though he’s completely immobile.

Indeed, he communicates the man’s soul.

The Theory of Everything is now screening.