The Theory of Everything

(seen 2 January 2015)

The film, based on Jane Hawking's second book about her life with Stephen Hawking, portrays their relationship from their first meeting as undergraduates in the early 1960s to his investiture as Companion of Honour some twenty-five years later, by which time they had married, brought up three children, and separated.

The salient points about Stephen are his brilliance as a scientist and the long affliction of motor neuron disease, with which he has now lived for 50 years, though it was expected that he would survive only about two years from the time of the diagnosis in 1963. But the film is not a biopic of a disabled genius; it is rather a portrait of a very strong, remarkable yet inevitably troubled marriage which did not survive the strain of all that happened.

Eddie Redmayne gives an outstanding performance as Stephen Hawking, tracking his physical deterioration from dishevelled and occasionally clumsy young man to the wheelchair-bound almost immobile middle-aged professor. It is a portrait of great sensitivity and charm coupled with extraordinary physical demands required of the actor in order to show the progression of the disease - but it is in no sense a showy performance, and all the more convincing for that. The attention to detail at all stages, both by Redmayne himself, and the camera's focus on his physical decline, makes for captivating if at times painful watching.

Felicity Jones plays Jane, and she is a tremendous foil in the film, which could so easily otherwise have fallen into sentimentality or prurience. Her deep devotion and enormous frustration are clear from a beautifully understated yet powerful performance, which while not requiring the physical rigours of Redmayne's portrayal still show a consummate acting skill. Her few displays of real pain and distress are of a piece with the stoical patience and strained forbearance she shows elsewhere.

They are surrounded by an excellent supporting cast. In particular Maxine Peake as Elaine Mason, the nurse who became Stephen's second wife, and Charlie Cox as Jonathan Hellyer Jones, the church organist who became Jane's second husband, give strong and sympathetic insights into their characters.

The film undoubtedly benefits from the photogenic charm of the Cambridge settings, where even the Hawking house looks so reliably English. The cinematography loves these settings but cleverly depicts the development of family life in the falsely warm and grainy colours of home videos, allowing a silent passage of time to take place between the salient scenes of the story. All the more odd, then, that Covent Garden is used as an intrusive stand-in for Bordeaux's Grand Opera House in one important episode - a real distraction for anyone who knows that something has been fudged.

In terms of content, the actual development of Stephen Hawking's ideas is only tangentially explored, as if they really are too complex to be dealt with other than by analogies with peas and potatoes. It is true of course that the ideas are complex, and rely on extremely specialised mathematical and physics-related concepts, and that the film is not a disguised lecture in cosmology. However, if complex human relationships and frailties can be intelligently explored in a mainstream film, it is not clear that some testing intellectual ideas - which are after all the basis of Hawking's fame - should have to be short-changed.