The Theory of Everything, directed by James Marsh and adapted from Jane Wilde’s autobiography, is a revelatory film about the life of the brilliant, death-defying physicist Stephen Hawking. However, the movie has more to do with love and devotion than science. Hawking himself defied a diagnosis of a motor neuron disease, ALS, that gave the then 21 year old man only 2 years to live.
Hawking turns 73 this January.
This is fitting for a man whose discoveries have set the scientific community reeling, suddenly having to reexamine everything it thought it knew. However, the film centers on Hawking’s relationship with his wife Jane as they navigate his medical condition, which has the perilous potential to be a chasm in their marriage. Through its poignant soundtrack, lovely, understated cinematography, and insightful screenplay, The Theory of Everything has all the staples of a touching and powerful biopic.
Eddie Redmayne as Stephen, and Felicity Jones as Jane, magnify this film so completely. Their superb acting carries the film and coaxes it into a masterful supernova. While Hawking’s life on paper is an inspirational success, a miracle, even, the film conveys a stunning portrait of loss, heartbreak, kindness, and love, the magnitude of which science and mathematics could never evoke.
Part of the pathos of the film is that because it is a biopic, the viewer knows the undeniable fact that the Hawking’s marriage dissolved in 1995. However, the movie is a series of beautiful and heart-wrenching moments, temporary infinities. Wilde is currently married to Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a close friend to the former couple, and Hawking was married to his nurse Elaine Mason for 11 years after the divorce. That the marriage didn’t last doesn’t mean that the extraordinary love between the Hawkings was any less valid or true. Stephen Hawking himself, after seeing the film, confirmed that it was “broadly true.”
As the film begins, Hawking is a toothy, charismatic college student whose future is almost as bright as the girl he’s in love with, Jane, played with refined delicacy by the lovely Jones. What follows is an atypically British dream sequence of moonlit parties, dancing, bantering, and tea. Hawking’s initial diagnosis, dramatized with an intense and catastrophic fall, comes at a time when the ambitious man is publicizing his first theory about time, and when most are earning their degrees. Ironically, Hawking earns not a degree nor an award, but a devastating time limit on his young life.
The reactions of Hawking’s friends and family to his illness are some of the most endearing points of the movie. Harry Lloyd as Stephen’s lighthearted, puckish companion offers support without infantilizing Stephen. Their relationship allows Stephen to demonstrate that while his disease stole his muscular functions, his wry wit remains intact, sometimes to the chagrin of Jane. Stephen’s colleagues maintain respect for him in the throes of his illness, when he can barely manage to speak a sentence, with little trace of the sickening patronization some ignorant individuals show the disabled. Finally, Jane’s response remains the true gem of this film. Despite the dissuasion of Stephen’s family, who have a better sense of what the diagnosis inevitably means, Jane demands to marry Stephen and marry they do in a lovely celebration, barely marred by Stephen’s inconspicuous walking stick.
All marriages have their challenges, and the Hawkings’ is not exempt. It’s bittersweet watching Jane, a talented young writer, unable to pursue her professional ambitions. However, she keeps her word. Her visible dedication to Stephen and her children shape her as the film’s true protagonist. Stephen reaps in award after award for his groundbreaking work, and his fame is definitely a chasm. As Stephen’s virility decreases, he becomes more adverse to outside help that Jane needs. Here Redmayne’s skill is highlighted; his character speaks less and less but his eyes beautifully portray the conflict and guilt he feels at binding his vital, healthy wife, which he is unable to articulate.
Jane, seeking an escape to the constant obligation her life as become, joins the church choir. The director, Jonathon, a widower, played by the charming Charlie Cox, befriends the Hawkings and perhaps because of his faith, assumes a paternal role in the family, traveling to the beach with them and pushing Stephen’s chair by the waves, teaching little Robert Hawking, accomplishing everything Jane and Stephen cannot for their family. This is the beginnings of a relationship that ends in a marriage between Jane and Charlie. However, in no way is Charlie an antagonist. His kindness is what saved the Hawking childrens’ childhood and preserved Stephen’s life and marriage. Charlie’s role in the film echoes the recurrent theme of unconditional love. While Hawking at first disregards the existence of a god due to his scientific loyalties, the presence of Cox, a born again Christian, is symbolic of the effect of spirituality on the living and yet more evidence that there are some concepts that science cannot define.
The Theory of Everything addresses the character flaws inherent in being human, even in those with a disability. While Stephen’s nurse Elaine regards him as a god-like figure, it is apparent that he, too, is imperfect: his stubbornness is a factor to his separation with Jane. Again, the film contradicts itself in proving that Stephen explains and doesn’t create. Therefore, he isn’t a god but more of a saint, a messenger.
The final scene is touching, a fitting finale to the poignant movie. Stephen, about sixty years old, at a lecture, gives a beautiful soliloquy in the essence of the movie: “There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”
We delve into Hawking’s mind and his entire life played back in fast motion to a rousing symphonic piece. As a dapper college student falls to the ground in a neat college quad, we realize that Stephen Hawking’s illness had everything to do with his success. Had he not been given a time limit on his own life, would he have had the determination to understand, to decode, the world he had so little time to enjoy? He made everything with nothing, which, seeing as he was one of few mortals to comprehend this daunting concept, makes perfect sense.
This film’s scientific concepts are fully understood, with the help of potato and pea diagrams at the dinner table, and their relevance to our lives is demonstrated not through chalkboards but through human tears and laughter, sadness and joy. While it has its comical moments, including Stephen’s robotic voice, which maintains its trademark grating American accent, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
So what, exactly, is The Theory of Everything? That line is more of statement than a question. It is a statement in the vein of all the laws of physics we know to be entirely true. It states that though infinitesimally insignificant, a speck in comparison to the broad universe, moments of humanity are everything, and cannot be extended but savored.
