THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: James Marsh
Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox,
David Thewlis, Emily Watson, Simon McBurney
This movie has at its heart two outstanding performances: Eddie Redmayne as cosmologist Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Hawking's wife Jane. Hawking's still in his 20s, a gawky math-and-science geek carousing his way through Oxford, when he catches the eye of Jane Wilde, and she catches his. They hit it off, but before long Hawking gets the bad news you know is coming: He's diagnosed with motor neuron disease, which he's told will kill him within two years. Hawking refuses to give up, and Jane refuses to give up on Hawking, and Hawking famously continued thinking and writing, while getting around in a motorized wheelchair and speaking through a computerized voice apparatus, till his death last week at 76. Marsh's direction is smart and polished, hitting the emotional keys where that's inevitable, while Redmayne's performance - and Hawking's complex and sometimes difficult personality - keeps the sentimentality under control. (Hawking can be selfish, arrogant and cruel, but he's also wickedly funny.) What you're left with is the dramatized account of a remarkable life - actually two of them. When you look at what Hawking was able to do, and what he had to overcome to do it, you wonder what the world would look like if those of us who are twice as lucky could accomplish half as much.
Stephen Hawking
(1942-2018)
