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Monday, March 23, 2015

Travelling to Infinity

Film: The Theory of Everything
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Most of my current heroes are mental heroes rather than physical ones. I don’t give a flying crap about sports these days, so it doesn’t affect me how many yards one quarterback threw for or how many home runs some left fielder hits. No, I tend to reserve my admiration for people of distinct and definable mental acuity, at least in the world outside of movies. At work, I often feel like the only person who can speak about someone like Krzysztof Kieslowski. I sometimes feel like I’m also the only person who can talk about a guy like Lawrence Krauss, although I suspect that isn’t true. It’s no surprise that The Theory of Everything was thus high on my list of films I wanted to see.

I can see people objecting off the top to the name of The Theory of Everything since the film itself doesn’t encompass an actual theory of everything. This is also true when the source material for the book has a great title: Jane Hawking’s book “Traveling to Infinity.”

Anyway, it’s actually kind of hard to determine exactly what the through-line of the film really is. Is it about the career of Stephen Hawking? Kind of, yes. Is it about the romance and eventual failed marriage of Stephen and Jane Hawking? Well, there’s some of that in here, too. Is it about the progression of Hawking’s degenerative illness? Yes, there as well. It’s about all three of these things, but because it is, it’s also kind of about none of them.

We start with Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) as a Cambridge student trying to decide on what his PhD thesis should cover. He meets Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) and over time, the two become a romantic item. After attending a lecture on black holes, Hawking starts thinking about the nature of black holes and the nature of time and decides on his thesis topic. It’s also at this time that he starts noticing that he is wearing down physically. After a serious fall, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease, more commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease and is given a two-year prognosis.

Jane stands by him and the two are married. The film skips through time, showing us both the progression of their marriage and the slow degeneration of his health. When he is awarded his doctorate, he walks with a pair of canes. Shortly thereafter, he is confined to a wheelchair. Eventually, the couple starts receiving help from Jonathan (Charlie Cox), who runs the choir at the local church. He and Jane become attracted to each other, but with the birth of the third Hawking child, he fades into the background since it is already suspected by many that he is the father.

Eventually, due to a tracheotomy necessitated by pneumonia, Hawking loses his voice for good and is granted the computer voice that has become so associated with him. Stephen and Jane drift further apart, partly because of his illness, partly because of her deep religious faith and his lack of belief, and partly because of Elaine (Maxine Peake), a nurse who eventually becomes Stephen Hawking’s second wife. The movie does end on a relative positive note despite the rather tragic nature of the couple’s relationship. It’s almost upbeat in spite of itself.

So let’s get into the guts here. First, it was nice to see Charlie Cox in something. I hadn’t seen him since Stardust, so it’s good that he’s still around (yes, I know he’s starring in the upcoming Daredevil series). But that’s a minor thing. The Oscar nominations here went to Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, so they’re the real focus.

Felicity Jones is good throughout. There are moments when she is essentially asked to demonstrate precisely how she feels without speaking, and she plays Jane Hawking as a woman who wears her emotions very openly. While it’s unspoken, I get the impression that a good deal of the trouble in the Hawkings’ marriage was just how much was expected of her and for how long it was expected. After all, this was a woman who signed up for a two-year tour of duty watching this man fade away and ended up married to him for better than three decades. She looks constantly tired and constantly frustrated, and it works.

Eddie Redmayne is the real story, though. It’s a cliché that men win Oscars by portraying someone who is mentally or physically handicapped in some way, but it’s also true that often his is because those roles are so demanding. Redmayne has the great good fortune of looking like Hawking, but he gets the physical side of it as well. He does more than just look like Hawking; he seems to inhabit him. It’s a hell of a role and a hell of a good performance.

My biggest complaint here, other than the title, is that no one seems to age. David Thewlis, who plays Hawking’s professor at the start of the film in the 1960s looks exactly the same when introducing Hawking at a lecture in the 1980s. Felicity Jones manages to look slightly matronly by the end of the film, but she looks pretty much the same as she did as someone in her early 20s at the start. If I didn’t know just from personal knowledge that the film covers 25-30 years, I’d have guessed that the time frame was more like seven or eight.

Still, for what it’s worth, more people need to know about science and be inspired by it. The Theory of Everything could do more in this regard, but it’s at least a good start.

Why to watch The Theory of Everything: More people need to have scientists as heroes.
Why not to watch: Nobody ages.

16 comments:

  1. "Nobody ages."

    Perhaps Hawking made some curious discoveries about the properties of time...

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  2. It is such a common problem that movies about science and scientists sacrifice the subject matter to more pedestrian themes and thereby reduce the story from something special to something you have seen a million times. I suppose it is called "the personal angle", but it always annoy me. To that effect I would rather see a narrow independent movie about science and scientists (like documentaries) than a blockbuster and so I chose to skip on this one. It screams "Man fights crippling disease and suffers in his love life while his wife pays the price" rather than "look, this is how space-time science was developed".

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    1. Yeah, I agree with this. There was a lot of potential for this to be more than a very well-acted movie of the week, but that is sort of how it comes across.

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  3. You have a point that the aging doesn't work so well. I thought Eddie Redmayne gave the best performance of the year and deserved his oscar. However the screenplay just felt too dumbed down for me, I wanted to learn a bit more about why Hawkings is so famous. Granted it was focused on the marriage and his disability, but still. Hopefully it can be a starter for looking up his accomplishments.

    By the way, there's an article worth reading how history and movie compare:
    http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/theory-of-everything

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    1. I've still got a lot of films from last year to get through, but I'm willing to say that at this point, it's the best performance I've seen from last year from either gender.

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  4. I agree with most everything you wrote. Had I not known that it spanned 30 years I would have thought it took maybe 6-8. The kids also disappeared once it was established that Jane had a hard time taking care of both them and him. We never saw them again until the end,

    It was definitely unfocused. I wish it had concentrated on the scientific achievements more, but I found out afterwards that it was based on Jane's book, not anything from Stephen - hence the large amount of attention paid to her plight in the movie. They also didn't even bother to explain how or why he far exceeded the 2 year diagnosis he was given. Again, had I not already known in real life I would have been frustrated by that. Not addressing it also contributed to confusion for people on how many years passed.

    For me Redmayne was definitely deserving of his Best Actor Oscar. Yes, it's a cliché, but he didn't just play handicapped. He had to map out exactly when in Hawking's life a scene was taking place, be aware of what state of degeneration his character was supposed to have, then he had to physically inhabit and portray that level of disability - all while still communicating his character's emotions. He might shoot three different scenes, at three different stages of disability, all in a single day. I thought he knocked it out of the park. Hawking himself said that there were times watching this movie that he felt like he was actually watching himself.

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    1. It's ironic that a film about the guy who discovered the beginning of time has a problem with the passage of time, isn't it?

      It does come from Jane's book, so even though the film very much focuses on him, it comes from her perspective in general. That being the case, we don't really get the science. For a lot of people, that's a good thing. For me, though, who is a science geek, it does end up leaving me feeling disappointed in what the film covers.

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  5. Echoing what some others have said, my biggest problem with this one was that it glossed over everything that made Stephen Hawking the foremost mind of our generation, opting instead to focus completely on his relationship with Jane and his growing disability. There were numerous scenes that offered a skimmed version of the topics and theorems that made Hawking so renowned and famous, or that didn't even offer that, opting instead to skip those parts in favor of fluff dialogue praising Hawking's genius, even though we have no real concept of why he is such a genius. Knowing that the film was written from a memoir by Jane helps alleviate this somewhat, but it irritated me regardless. Redmayne was excellent, though.

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    1. Redmayne really is the reason to watch this. My guess is that in addition to this coming from Jane's book, that there may well have been fear that too much science would turn people off and turn this more into a documentary. I think the idea may have been an attempt to humanize Hawking, hence the scene with him doing a Dalek impression, for instance.

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  6. I enjoyed The Theory of Everything, but also felt that the science was short-changed (and the computer science was also short-changed in The Imitation Game). I recently caught up with another good film about science but from another era, 1943's Madame Curie. I was impressed how that film was able to combine a much more thorough presentation of the science, while still maintaining a human focus and presenting a decades-long romance.

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    1. I watched Madame Curie about a month ago, and I agree completely. That's a movie that not only gives a compelling portrait of the people in question, but really focuses on the science.

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  7. I have not seen this, but there is another recent (2007-ish) Hawking film with Benedict Cumberbatch. It sounds like it has more science in it than 'The Theory of Everything.' It also only looked at a young Hawking, but I thought it was quite good. Well worth seeing and would be interesting to compare the two.

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    1. The movie you're talking about is a 2004 made-for-TV film. It might be worth tracking down, if only to see the damn science.

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  8. I'm actually quite fine with the lack of scientific detail, but was a little confused by the almost Dorian Grayish non-aging.

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    1. There is that, although Redmayne did a good job with the progression of the illness.

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