The Theory of Everything

Runtime: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: James Marsh

Quick Impressions:
My family planned to see the new Hunger Games movie over the Thanksgiving holiday, but apparently there’s an unspoken rule around here this fall that at least one person per family must come down with some inconvenient illness every two to three days.  So I’m sure I’ll see Mockingjay sometime before the end of the year, but exactly when is up in the air at this moment.

Meanwhile, I went by myself to The Theory of Everything.  For months, I’ve been hearing that this Stephen Hawking biopic (apparently rather liberally adapted from the memoir of Hawking’s first wife, Jane) is practically guaranteed to get Oscar nominations for Actor, Actress, and Picture, so of course I wanted to see it.

Up to this point, the career of Felicity Jones has consisted almost entirely of films I have intended to see but then somehow missed, so while I can’t with any honesty call myself a fan of her work, I certainly have nothing against her.  And since I haven’t yet been able to see most of the performances getting Best Actress buzz this year, I was terribly excited to see Jones’ s widely acclaimed turn as Jane Wilde Hawking, first wife of the living cosmologist most celebrated in our current pop culture.

Now Eddie Redmayne I actively like.  I thought he was surprisingly captivating in My Week With Marilyn (a very underwhelming movie in many other respects).  And his performance in Les Mis rose in my estimation steadily as the movie progressed.  (“Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” can be such a pleasure to hear, but only if the person playing Marius can sing, and Redmayne sure can.)  I think he’s a charming young man (although actually, he’s not all that young.  He’s 31, believe it or not.  He looks ten years younger!)  All year long, Oscar pundits and entertainment bloggers have been calling him a virtual lock for a Best Actor nomination, and after seeing the movie, I understand why.  (Well, to be honest, I understood why before seeing the movie, too.  When you’re playing someone with advanced ALS, and you’re not actually suffering from a motor neuron disease yourself, you typically end up with either an Oscar nod or pointed ridicule).

Redmayne’s performance is good, so good that about forty minutes in, I caught myself thinking, He’s good, but I don’t see why he’s necessarily an Oscar contender. Of course, I suppose it’s difficult to play someone with ALS.  And then it hit me for the first time, Oh wow!  That’s right!  He’s not actually sick.  He’s just acting.

I was aware that Redmayne was giving as performance, mimicking the personality of Stephen Hawking.  But somehow, I forgot his physical symptoms were all just part of the act.

That bodes well for Redmayne’s Oscar chances.  His performance, to be honest, is much, much better than the movie around it.  Sometimes that helps get Oscar attention, too.

The Good:
I was a little surprised by how much I failed to be impressed by this movie.  I won’t say that I didn’t like it.  What I felt as I watched was certainly not active dislike.  But my level of enthusiasm for the film never rose all the way to “like.”  For such an acclaimed project to elicit such a tepid response from me is really quite unusual.  Most of the time, buzzed about movies do impress me.  And in the event that I’m not charmed by such a film, my more typical reaction is one of extreme dislike or violent disgust.  But this movie just kind of left me cold.

I just don’t see what’s so great about The Theory of Everything.  To me, it felt toned down, generic, safe, bland—completely lacking in the kind of rich detail and random eccentricities that would make it a captivating look at a famous figure’s real life.

I have to say, my reaction surprised me.  (My husband was surprised, too, when I told him.)  Ordinarily, I notice primarily what is working and what does captivate me in any piece of fiction, so why I failed to connect with The Theory of Everything is somewhat a mystery.  To me the whole story seems kind of

pointless, but I’ll hold my specific complaints until the end of this review and focus for now on aspects of the film that did impress me.

And then, of course, comes the diagnosis.  Watching Stephen and his friends and family try to process and come to grips with his illness is also compelling viewing.

And as the film goes on, we continue to learn quite a bit about motor neuron disease (maybe more than that first doctor who gave Stephen only two years to live!).  Without a doubt, the biggest surprise to me was Stephen’s ongoing ability to father children.  By the time the last one is born, he’s functioning physically on the level of an infant himself, and yet he’s still able to father a child without any reproductive assistance.

The explanation he gives—erections are a function of the autonomic (or involuntary) nervous system, so Stephen’s motor neuron disease does not affect them—makes so much sense that after hearing it, I was shocking it had never occurred to me before.

Then again, if you’re like me, you don’t really fill the idle moments of your day by sitting around thinking, I wonder how Stephen Hawking’s sex life works.

Still it’s very interesting to see what a surprisingly high quality of life Hawking enjoys when his first two children are young.  I mean, yes, he gets trapped in his own sweater (literally), but he also jokes and plays chase with his kids.  He seems to enjoy a very warm and delightfully ordinary relationship with them when they are young.

So it’s very interesting to get this glimpse into Hawking’s early life and to learn how his disease works and to watch how it progresses.

As Jane Hawking, meanwhile, Felicity Jones gets a huge amount of screentime, way more than the female lead in most movies.  I was not quite as impressed with her performance as others have been, though.  It isn’t her acting.  It’s the character I couldn’t quite ever seem to connect with.  If Jones does get a Best Actress nomination, I won’t be surprised or disappointed, but I personally didn’t see what made the performance that special.  (Lots of people are good at science, but they don’t perform at Hawking’s level.  That’s how I feel about this performance.  She’s good, yeah.  But lots of people are good.  That’s why they’re professional actresses.)

The rest of the cast is also quite good, although most supporting players have roles that are quite small.  I particularly liked David Thewlis as Stephen’s professor and mentor (though I spent most of the movie trying to place him and wondering why he always made me think of Alan Rickman even though he clearly was not Alan Rickman).  Emily Watson and Simon McBurney are barely even in the movie, but they have their moments, too.  I also loved Maxine Peake as Elaine Mason, a character I wish we’d looked at a bit more closely.

And The Theory of Everything does have a very memorable, noticeable score.  At moments, it was a little overpowering for me, but some of the music is quite lovely.  (I think it upstages the action a bit from time to time, but some people prefer ostentatious scores, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it nominated.)

Best Scene Visually:
I liked the image of Hawking in the arms of Queen Victoria.  (At least, I think it was Queen Victoria.  The moment is brief, but the scene is so much fun.)  Harry Lloyd is great as Stephen’s friend Brian.  All of their scenes together have a natural, easy feeling.

Best Action Sequence:
Probably because we all know he’s Stephen Hawking and will end up in a wheel chair, practically every early scene of the movie features Stephen either running (actually running) late or participating in some kind of race or physical interaction.  I find that interesting.  Time is a problem for Stephen right from the start.  He’s always in a hurry.  He’s always coming from behind in a race.

I suppose in terms of scenes focusing on action and movement, two stand out, and they certainly pair well.  There’s the poignant moment when (feeling trapped and overwhelmed) Stephen leaves the dining room while guests are over for dinner and awkwardly attempts to pull himself up the stairs by holding onto the bottom of the bannister railing and sliding up on his side.  Then he sees his infant son behind the baby gate and tries to convince the child that everything is all right.

Slightly later in the film, Stephen gets a wheelchair.  Suddenly, he’s able to play crazy, out-of-control games of tag with his children.  He and the kids are having such a good time that nobody cares that they’re crashing into all the furniture and destroying the living room—except Jane, but it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone how she feels.  No longer struggling to walk, Stephen seems strangely liberated, but now Jane feels increasingly trapped and overwhelmed.

Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Eddie Redmayne:
Redmayne’s performance is by far the best aspect of this movie.  Surely this will kick his career into high gear and make him more recognizable to American audiences.

After watching the film, I read an interview with Redmayne in which he explained that one of the hugest challenges of depicting Hawking’s degenerating health on screen was that the movie was filmed out of order.  That would be a huge challenge!  If I had to play a character becoming increasingly infirm over the course of thirty years, I’d much rather do it in a stage production, with a conventional, linear structure.  Get into character, imagine yourself aging, transition naturally from stage to stage of the disease.  I would imagine that’s the way any actor would prefer to tackle such a role.

Instead, Redmayne had to jump at random from moment to moment of Hawking’s life.  In one scene, he’d be forty, in the next twenty-three, in the next thirty-two.  (I’m just tossing out ages, not alluding to specific scenes.)  Being able to jump into a scene and play it with the proper amount of disability seems like a pretty Herculean feat to me.  And as I mentioned before, Redmayne does this so well that for the first third of the movie, I completely forgot that the actor didn’t actually have ALS.  Redmayne’s performance feels so real that it gives us the illusion of watching genuine human suffering.  There’s nothing exaggerated or stagey about it at all.

Sheerly based on his sensitive, nuanced, and thoroughly convincing portrayal of Hawking’s disability, Redmayne deserves the Oscar nomination, and fortunately for him, this is exactly the type of performance that always gets the Academy’s attention.

Another somewhat miraculous strength of Redmayne’s performance is the way he manages to make Hawking increasingly charismatic and interesting as the movie goes on.  By the end, the guy’s had a tracheotomy.  He can’t sit up straight, and he can barely make any voluntary movements at all.  And yet, he’s somehow more interesting than he ever was when he was younger.  When a new character develops feelings for him late in the film, we can totally understand why.  How in the world does he manage to seem clever, witty, impish, fascinating, and attractive when he’s so incredibly physically diminished?

Honestly, looking back now, I’m beginning to realize that this is a huge strength (and a very striking feature) of the film that I failed to recognize or appreciate while watching the movie.  Vibrant, young, compassionate Jane falls in love with Stephen in spite of her awareness that he has a degenerative disease which will first disable and eventually kill him.  She insists on loving him.  She seems to want to save him.  And she does.  But for Jane, the marriage becomes exhausting, draining, all-consuming.  By the time their life together has dragged on for decades, Jane is the one who seems diminished, depleted.  Stephen, on the other hand, practically gains vitality and charm, despite his crushing physical limitations.  Looking back, I consider this the most remarkable aspect of the (otherwise pretty unremarkable) film.

How amazing that Redmayne is able to give us this impression, to convey Hawking’s easy charm and indomitable spirit while simultaneously giving a convincing portrayal of a man with a very advanced case of ALS!

I think that the film around it could definitely be stronger, but Redmayne’s lead performance definitely does shine, and I’m fairly positive he’ll be rewarded with a Best Actor nomination.  I’ve heard people say that he could actually win, but I remain skeptical on that front.  I don’t think he has the star power yet, frankly, but I guess Adrien Brody did win for The Pianist when he was even younger and more unknown, so anything is possible.

Ironically, one of Redmayne’s more visible competitors for Best Actor this year is fellow Brit Benedict Cumberbatch who also played Stephen Hawking in a BBC movie several years ago (a bit of trivia I discovered while reading an old interview with Jane Hawking related to the release of that production).

Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Felicity Jones:
People have been raving a lot about Jones’s performance, too, and to be honest, I don’t see it.  She’s not bad as Jane Hawking, but Redmayne is so much better (I think because the character is more interesting).  You know who else is more interesting?  Jennifer Connelly’s character in A Beautiful Mind.  There’s nothing wrong with Jones’s Jane, but I don’t think the character leaves enough of an impression to be an Oscar winning role.

Of course, I may be judging the performance too harshly because I found myself unable to connect with the character.  It’s not that Jones gives a bad performance.  It’s just that from my point of view, the entire story is sort of unnecessary.  The reason everybody knows Stephen Hawking and until now few knew much about his wife Jane is that there’s less to know about her.  He’s brilliant and afflicted and has published extensively and has influenced a generation of scientists.  And she’s his first wife.

As a stay-at-home mom/wife myself, I am not suggesting that what women do in the home to care for their families is not an important contribution.  It’s crucial.  Jane’s sacrifices and hands-on care almost certainly extended her husband’s life, definitely improved his quality of life, and clearly made possible many of his scientific discoveries.  (The world would not know Hawking’s genius if he’d given up and died in despair or from neglect in his early twenties.)  What Jane gave Stephen was without question vitally important.  But that doesn’t mean it’s interesting to strangers.

Now it could be interesting.  From what I’ve read, the movie tones down and leaves out a lot of the more distinctive material from Jane Hawking’s book, the stuff that would make the movie more memorable and less cookie-cutter bland.  I’m willing to bet that the real Jane Hawking is done a disservice by this film.  In fact, she sounds more interesting in some of the brief print interviews that I read than she seems in the movie.

Clearly, though, the character (as written in the screenplay) doesn’t work for me, and that’s obviously going to color my assessment of the actress’s performance.

For most of the film, Jane is overshadowed (sometimes to the point of being sublimated) by Stephen.  She really only comes into her own as an interesting, three-dimensional character when she’s interacting with Jonathan.

That’s largely because in this film, Jonathan (though he seems like a genuinely kind person) has no interests outside of Jane (other than his sincere faith and devotion to the church choir, but Jane shares those interests).  So just as Jane is there to prop up Stephen (a role in which she’s often unseen and unappreciated), Jonathan kind of disappears into the thankless, borderline invisible role of supporting Jane.

The portion of the film when Jonathan first comes into Jane’s life is the best part of the movie, and all of Jones’s finest work is in these scenes.  In particular, she shines in the moment when Stephen’s mother rudely confronts her with a tactless and cruel question.

Best Scene:
That’s actually the best scene in the movie, too, when the Stephen Hawking family brings their new baby for a visit with his paternal grandparents.  The way Stephen’s parents treat Jane in this scene is inexcusably rude and heartless.  Even before Stephen’s mother actually says something, their general behavior is extremely inconsiderate.

Even if what his mother rather boldly suggests were true (which the film makes clear it is not), I thought people in polite society were supposed to work around those kinds of things and look the other way.  Isn’t it pretty low class to make such insinuations?  The polite thing to do is not notice.  And certainly given the unique and difficult situation, the compassionate response would be sympathetic discretion.

Actually (whether intentionally or not) this film makes a pretty good case for polyamory.  As someone who’s monogamous by nature, explanations of why it’s necessary to have multiple partners often leave me baffled, but in this scenario, I think it’s quite obvious that two adults are not enough to keep the Hawking family functioning.  Jane and Stephen really do require a third partner.

Stephen doesn’t want a nurse, which is understandable.  He needs twenty-four hour care, and what Jane must do for him is extremely intimate.  He’s helpless and vulnerable and prefers that his wife care for him, not some stranger.  That totally makes sense.

The thing is, everyone who has taken care of an infirm relative or lived with somebody who has knows that if this situation goes on for any length of time, the caregiver also requires a caregiver.  Taking care of an invalid is exhausting.  And if Jane pours all her energy and emotional resources into caring for Stephen, then who is going to care for Jane when she becomes depleted?  Stephen can’t.  He may want to, but he is so depleted himself that giving anything substantial to her is impossible for him.

So this portion of the film was really quite interesting to me, and I think the confrontation scene at the in-laws’ house is probably the best in the film.  Certainly it is the best scene for Jones.  For once, something is finally about Jane.

The Negatives:
That’s really the problem with the movie in my opinion.  It pretends to be a Stephen Hawking biopic, but it’s not really about Stephen Hawking.  If you’re hoping to learn some actual science from this movie—forget it.  Read a book instead.

No, The Theory of Everything is based on a memoir by Jane Hawking.  Knowing that, we might expect it to be less about Stephen and more about Jane.  Here’s the thing, though.  It’s not actually about Jane, either.

There’s really nothing to tell about Jane (at least not movie Jane).  As a young woman, she makes the baffling decision to marry a man she barely knows, knowing that he has a degenerative, fatal disease that will rapidly turn him into an invalid and will probably kill him within two years.  Then she decides to have two children with him immediately.

Oh yes.  Another thing worth mentioning is that this man is an extremely brilliant and ambitious PhD student in the sciences who wants to make a great contribution to his field.  Also (unlike the devout Jane) he’s an atheist (not because of bitterness after learning of his condition, but because he’s very pragmatic and simply has never believed in God.)

Guess what happens?  (You will never believe it!)  Soon Jane begins to feel overwhelmed, trapped, depressed, and undervalued.  She has no time for her own work and academic accomplishments.  (Who would have predicted that???????).  She feels that people don’t value her vague interest in Spanish poetry as highly as her husband’s accomplishments in cosmology.  She has no time for herself.  She finds it quite tiring to care for her invalid husband 24/7 with no help and to care for two young children simultaneously.  She resents the fact that her husband’s atheism is sincere and persistent.  If he respected her faith, wouldn’t he share it?  Surely atheists really believe in God deep down, don’t they?  Every guy is an atheist in college, right?  But then getting married and having a couple of kids right away inevitably makes a good Anglican out of him—isn’t that the way it works?

I don’t know.  I feel like I’m being quite a jerk about this, but none of it really makes sense to me.  What did Jane think would happen?  Life doesn’t end on your wedding day (unless you’re in some send up of a mob movie).

A headline would read, “Woman Makes Poor Choices, Reality Continues to Function as Expected.”

You know what I would love to know?  Why does Jane make that choice?  Why does she marry Stephen?  Why does she love him so much?  (Seriously, she just met him.)  What about him does she love so much?  The movie doesn’t really get into that.  It should.  That would be interesting.

If I were Jane, I would be thinking, There’s so much that’s still not known about ALS.  Is it heritable to any degree?  (Is ALS heritable?  It may not be.  I’m not going to research things that might harm unborn children right now.)  How will I be able to care for two children if my husband needs twenty-four hour care?  What happens when he dies?  How will I care for two children on my own when I haven’t finished my education, and my husband is a poor grad student with no money to leave me?

Now I don’t mean to seem heartless.  I actually do believe in love, and I understand that when you’re in love, you behave differently than when you are not.  But to me movie Jane comes across as someone who is eager to show people how spunky and remarkable she is.  It seems like she marries Stephen because she wants to do something great with her life and to impress people.  Taking care of someone with ALS makes you look really noble, especially if he has the makings of a truly great scientist.

But how do you marry someone who is A) a Hawking-level scientist and B) about to require total care and not realize that either one of those things probably means that your own professional dreams will probably soon be sidelined?

In the end, Jane falls in love with an able-bodied theist who is interested in and affirming of her.  Her relationship with him brings her out, and truly, this is the only part of the film when she seems like a full realized, interesting person in her own right.

But you know, in interviews, Jane Hawking seems interesting.  And she talks about all kinds of stuff (apparently stuff that does appear in her book) that is not mentioned in the movie.  The movie makes it look like the Hawkings realized they were no longer enough for each other and drifted beautifully apart like two ships passing in the night.  But that’s not how the real Jane Hawking tells it at all.  She even says in one interview that over time, ALS seems to alter personality, and she talks about Stephen as being controlling, dismissive, having a God-complex.

And then it turns out that Stephen’s second wife supposedly violently abused him for years!  Clearly there’s much more of a story going on there that this film doesn’t even touch.

Part of the problem is, Stephen Hawking is alive and quite respected, and surely nobody wants to offend him.  The problem with celebrity biographies and biopics.  If the subject is dead, people tend to say all sorts of insane (often highly insulting, sometimes ridiculous) things about them.  But if the person is alive and highly regarded, then the danger is that the truth is sacrificed to avoid offending the subject.

In the end, The Theory of Everything doesn’t tell us much about Jane or Stephen.  It’s practically about nothing.  (It tells us that Stephen thought a bunch of ideas about black holes, but it never really explains what he actually thinks.  I remember fondly the way my college roommate paraphrased a moment from the first lecture in our Basic Ideas of Astronomy class.  “In a real astronomy class, they would make you learn a bunch of equations.  We just want you to know that there are equations.”)  I guess that’s the problem with most things purporting to be about “everything.”  They’re always far too vague.

After the movie, I read everything I could find online about Jane and Stephen Hawking, and it was all much more interesting than anything in this film.

Overall:
I was not impressed by The Theory of Everything, although it did inspire me to learn more about the real lives of Jane and Stephen Hawking.  Eddie Redmayne’s performance is pretty fantastic and should earn him a Best Actor nomination (if not a win).  Felicity Jones will probably be nominated, too, but if she’s not, I won’t be too disappointed.  (I think most critics disagree with me, though, so use your own judgment.)