The Theory of Everything (2014)
Directed by James Marsh
Once a healthy, active young man, Hawking received an earth-shattering diagnosis at 21 years of age. With Jane fighting tirelessly by his side, Stephen embarks on his most ambitious scientific work, studying the very thing he now has precious little of – time.
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18 films that influenced The Theory of Everything
What critics say influenced The Theory of Everything
It’s wrenching to watch and recalls elements of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in “My Left Foot.”
All this makes the performance of the youthful, freckled Redmayne, at 32 playing his first lead in a movie, so exciting, and reminiscent of another British actor's memorable performance at the same age — Daniel Day-Lewis, in "My Left Foot."
Still, what’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
Eddie Redmayne's captivating performance will be compared to Daniel Day Lewis's achievement in "My Left Foot," but it is important to note how much life, joy and humor he brings to the role with little more than a cocked eyebrow, a few facial muscles and his eyes (a scene where he gets his head caught in a sweater when Jane leaves the room is delightfully relatable).
It recalls Daniel Day Lewis' in My Left Foot — minus the rage.
Comparisons to Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning work in "My Left Foot" are inevitable — and not undeserved.
Striving to pay equal tribute to Hawking’s first wife, Jane (on whose memoir the film is based), and her tireless devotion to him until their 25-year marriage ended in 1995, director James Marsh similarly attempts to find intimate, personal applications for Hawking’s grand cosmic inquiries, tracing the story of how the author of “A Brief History of Time” came to defy time itself.
If I want a more complicated explanation of the universe, then I can refer to Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time.”
This isn't A Brief History of Time (1991) or Stephen Hawking's Grand Design (2012).
The thing is, Errol Morris already made A Brief History of Time , and there's simply not much about the life and work of Stephen Hawking that the 80-minute documentary left on the table.
The inspirational biopic about a person with a disability who triumphs over adversity isn’t something new (though a really good one, like Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , can still do something new with the form).
Still, what’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
You'll also see echoes of the math-equation moments in "Good Will Hunting" and the communication challenges of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," though, of course, Hawking's story predates both of those films.
This movie concentrates on Hawking's personal life, and should draw favorable comparisons to "My Left Foot," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and other tastefully triumphant, fact-based dramas about protagonists who do not allow disabilities to destroy their achievements and lives.
Viewers looking to see a challenging and enlightening perspective on a similar condition should see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , which uses pioneering camera and narrative technique to get inside the mind of its paralyzed protagonist.
The Theory of Everything doesn’t worry itself with tunneling into Hawking’s psyche or find ways to visualize his breathtaking mind the way great bio-movies like My Left Foot or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly have done.
As gentle and saintly as Jennifer Connelly's character in A Beautiful Mind, Jones' Jane is immensely appealing if a bit unbelievable.
Like Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind,” James Marsh’s “The Theory of Everything” presents a glossy, manipulative but affecting portrait of a brilliant man struck, but not struck down, by a terrible malady—in the case of John Nash, the protagonist of Howard’s film, schizophrenia, and in that of Stephen Hawking, the focus of this one, motor-neuron disease.
It’s unlikely to generate the same high profile as, say, A Beautiful Mind, another notable biopic about a scientist with a disability and a long-suffering wife.
By focusing on the relationship, “The Theory of Everything” largely backgrounds Hawking’s scientific achievements, although it doesn’t dismiss them; this isn’t like “A Beautiful Mind,” which ended with the message that what’s really important in life is “a beautiful heart.”
It is no more about science than Pollock was about painting or Julie & Julia was about cooking, and less than A Beautiful Mind was about mathematics.
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It's not the best imaginable performance of Hawking that could be given (according to most who have seen it - I have not - it adds nothing that Benedict Cumberbatch didn't already do in the 2004 television movie Hawking ), it's more than this rickety display of shallow humanism requires.
There is much biographical crossover between the 2004 BBC TV film Hawking (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Hawking) and this grander, more photogenic adaptation of his first wife Jane's memoir.
James Marsh, an Oscar winner for “Man on Wire,” has cracked the Hawking code with “The Theory of Everything,” a movie that fuses Hawking’s disability, brilliant mind and rich personal life in a portrait that mirrors the mysteries of the vast universe with those of life on this terrestrial plane.
It’s something of a tribute to Marsh — whose skills are generally far better used in his documentaries like Man on Wire than in undistinguished narrative work — that he doesn’t betray the onset of Stephen’s disease in one melodramatic-cough-to-signal-he’s-dying moment.
To date, Marsh is best known for tougher fare, whether it be the documentaries Man on Wire and Project Nim, or the dramas Wisconsin Death Trip and Shadow Dancer; one wouldn’t have imagined him at the helm of an inspiring, life-affirming tear-jerker.
The director James Marsh (of the superb documentaries Man on Wire and Project Nim) and screenwriter Anthony McCarten compensate by creating a meltingly sweet romance in the early scenes, building to Jane’s declaration to Hawking’s father (Simon McBurney) that, no matter the dire prognosis, she and her love will fight the disease together.
Theory director James Marsh is actually best known for his docs (he did the lauded Man on Wire and Project Nim), but here he’s determined to string Cupid’s love bow and buff Oscar’s golden bod rather than win any kudos for scientific accuracy.
As such, it’s something of a disappointment for fans of James Marsh, director of such excellent documentaries as Man on Wire and Project Nim and the features Shadow Dancer , The King and one third of the Red Riding trilogy.
You'll also see echoes of the math-equation moments in "Good Will Hunting" and the communication challenges of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," though, of course, Hawking's story predates both of those films.
To date, Marsh is best known for tougher fare, whether it be the documentaries Man on Wire and Project Nim, or the dramas Wisconsin Death Trip and Shadow Dancer; one wouldn’t have imagined him at the helm of an inspiring, life-affirming tear-jerker.
Directed by Marsh (“Man on Wire,” “Wisconsin Death Trip”), “Theory” is based not on Hawking’s own “A Brief History of Time” (there’s a good Errol Morris documentary about that), but on the memoir written by his first wife, Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones).
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James Marsh's movie is for physicist Stephen Hawking what Walk the Line was to Johnny Cash, emotional complexity distilled for easier commercial digestion.
The film is lushly photographed by Benoît Delhomme ("Lawless," "A Most Wanted Man"), reveling in the romanticism of Cambridge's May Ball and the cool verdancy of the English countryside.
Marsh, an accomplished documentarian-turned-feature director whose last film, Shadow Dancer (2013), was a slow-burn drama set against “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and French cinematographer Benoît Delhomme (Lawless, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) give The Theory of Everything a heightened visual style that bathes virtually every sequence in an emotionally charged light.