12/03/2014
Review by David Anthony
Play Audio

The life and work of physicist Stephen Hawking, as seen through the eyes of Jane Wilde, his first spouse, which formed the basis of her memoir Travelling to Infinity, My Life with Stephen, is the subject of the film The Theory of Everything, directed by James Marsh, with a screenplay by Anthony McCarten based upon Wilde’s book.

Eddie Redmayne is Hawking, while Felicity Jones portrays Jane in a reconstruction of key events marking their coupling, marriage and ultimate uncoupling as Hawkings struggled with Jane’s help to cope with the crippling effects of motor neuron disease. The two great tales unfolding simultaneously and interdependently are of a love then marital relationship and Hawking’s meteoric rise to prominence as an innovative scientific theorist, starting with research into Black Holes as a route to determining whether time had a beginning to the quest for what the title suggests, a theory to explain existence.

The gift of the film is its ability to take on the heady stuff of physics and then balance it with romance, propelled by the electricity of the lead actors. Redmayne and Jones are assisted by David Thewlis as Hawking’s Cambridge mentor physicist Dennis Sciama and Simon McBurney and Emily Watson as Hawking’s mother and father. Special mention should go to Charlie Cox as Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a choirmaster and caretaker who played a decisive role in the lives of Stephen and especially Jane.

Redmayne’s transformations, first into Hawking, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance, and then from ostensibly able-bodied to grievously afflicted patient then highly dependent man whose intellect is unfettered by the chains of infirmity is really remarkable. Redmayne is able to capture oceans of emotion in a knowing wink, sly smile or lascivious leer to remind us that however things may look, he is very much engaged in the here and now.

The film does not shy away from the hard questions posed by the circumstances in which Hawkings and Wilde find themselves. How does one create and sustain what can be considered a “normal” existence, in the face of such monumental challenges? Yet Jane and Stephen do raise progeny under extraordinarily trying conditions, and Hawkings continues to work, at great expense to everyone around him. While this unavoidably situates Hawkings the innovator in the pantheon of the great, it is clear that his stature could not have been reached without the support of Jane and others.

The Theory of Everything affords much food for thought. It will not leave viewers wanting.