"The Theory Of Everything"

 

Film biographies, as my review of Get On Up established, constitute a category of films that I am quite wary of, due to their tendency to turn into catalogues of the famous person’s life and consequently travel that life’s highway in broad steps, only pausing to photograph the roses in pretty colours that will hit the viewer in all the right emotional spots without taking the risk of never making them look at roses the same way again.¹ This unwillingness to take risks often translates in an overreliance upon the virtuoso performances of the actors and actresses playing these people, which in worst cases (The Iron Lady comes to mind) places these performances at the center of a vacuum where life itself should be.

 

The Theory Of Everything, sadly, will not go down in history as one of the biopics that reversed the trend. Like most of them, it benefits tremendously from its central performance (a transformative Eddie Redmayne) but is too enamored with the subject of that performance to extract anything truly deep or meaningful out of it. Certainly, the life of Stephen Hawking is nothing if not an inspirational one – a man who, despite having been given two years to live after his Motor Neurone Disease diagnosis, went on to become one of the most celebrated scientific minds in human history – and if the film brings hope to fellow suffers (which it most certainly will, if only as an additional reminder of Dr. Hawking’s bravery and resilience) then that should already be more than enough to justify its existence. It will not, however, be enough for it to be considered a good work of film art. Basing himself on the memoirs of Hawking’s first wife Jane (very well played by Felicity Jones), screenwriter & playwright Anthony McCarten portrays their relationship with old-fashioned British classicism that suits their environment but tackles the effects of both Hawking’s work and his MND on that relationship with great timidity in the former case and overt sentimentalism in the latter. Screenplay beats – support after diagnosis, marriage, good times, deterioration, new ideas induced by mundane elements – are duly followed without leaving much time for the characters to have an existence outside the constraints of what their scenes require them to do in order to advance the plot and force viewers to be moved. An approach that director James Marsh’s safe stylistic choices only confirm: Yellow lighting and color correction for most Cambridge and indoor scenes, green filters for a sad scene, and narrative ellipses in the form of montages of Hawking and his family in grainy soundless pictures meant to resemble Super 8 home videos. These ellipses are particularly irritating as they only serve to remind the viewer of the plot’s imperative above all other things and of his exclusion from any moments – factual or fictional – of Hawking or his wife’s lives that would exist purely for itself and thus allow the possibility of a fresh perspective on the man. These choices do not necessarily make for unentertaining viewing – though Jóhann Jóhannsson’s intrusive and cloyingly manipulative score certainly works to that effect – but they further restrain the characters’ ability to move beyond Hollywood-inspired paradigms, something all the more problematic considering their firmly-held basis in reality. At their worst, they expose the film’s transparent exploitation of the inspirational nature of Hawking’s story by excessive visual underlining: Hawking’s speech in front of students towards the end of the film, played over shots of their captivated faces in a way that’s practically instructing the viewer to emulate them; the first presentation of his theory on black holes, initially greeted with condescending dismissal by traditional academics who promptly leave the room until a Russian scientist stands up to congratulate him, which somehow seems enough to encourage everyone else in the room to follow suit. These are just two such examples of scenes whose writing and staging make Marsh and McMarten’s desire of how the viewer is expected to react all too clear.

 

The Theory Of Everything’s best scenes are those that properly address the separate battles fought by the Hawkings against Stephen’s disease, battles that went beyond the obvious physical challenges. Most of these scenes involve Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox), a kind and faithful Christian choir conductor to whom Jane is introduced after her mother (Emily Watson, shamefully wasted) advises her to take up choir singing to take her mind off the difficulties of coping with Stephen’s illness. Their attraction to each other is immediate, mutual and not lost on Stephen; this loads his first meeting with Jonathan with ambivalence that Redmayne conveys sublimely using only his eyes and eyebrows. However, he recognizes a good soul and admits that he can provide Jane with the kind of “normalcy” and stability that he cannot. Thus he allows the creation of a very chaste ménage à trois to take form, and Jonathan becomes an extended member of their family. The bittersweet romantic tension between these people is genuinely moving, and more such authenticity would have greatly serviced the film as a whole.

 

¹My sincere apologies to Confucius for that particularly forced joke.