THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING REVIEW
of tea, dropping pencils – which initially could be seen
as just scatterbrained brilliance. But a serious fall brings
a grim diagnosis: Hawking has MND and two years to
live. His girlfriend, Jane, played with fierce, pinched
determination and English-rose beauty by Felicity Jones,
refuses to give up on him. They marry and have children;
the two-year mortality deadline comes and goes,
Hawking’s reputation continues to climb and it’s clear
that something special is happening.
The scenes and stock characters look pretty familiar at
first, with brainy chaps in sports jackets frowning over
their equations in the lab, drinking pints of foamy bitter
in the pub and chatting up girls – just as we saw in The
Imitation Game or indeed Life Story, the 1987 BBC TV
movie about James Watson and Francis Crick in 1950s
Cambridge discovering the structure of DNA. (This
movie, oddly, seems to make everyone in those 1960s
pubs stick to 21st-century no-smoking rules.)
Eddie Redmayne portrays Hawking with simplicity,
candour and unforced intelligence; he shines a light on
the miracle of his survival into middle age, and subtly
suggests how this was partly due to a revitalising,
reticent uxorious passion in response to his wife’s
devotion to him. Yet it also hints at how the discoveries
themselves kept him alive, perhaps even suggesting that
he physically imploded into a dark star of pure cerebral
force, while his fragile frame had to bear a daunting
emotional burden. Redmayne’s performance also shows
how the famous electronic voice box liberated him – and
how that synthetic voice, with its sing-song robotic tone,
enigmatically conceals what he is really thinking and
feeling.
Advertisement
The basic story has been recounted in that Cumberbatch
TV film and in a recent documentary by Stephen
Finnigan, Hawking. The brilliant young mathematician
at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the early 1960s is starting
to make a name for himself, but also shows a worrying
tendency to clumsiness – stumbling, knocking over mugs
Eddie Redmayne portrays Hawking with simplicity,
candour and unforced intelligence; he shines a light on
the miracle of his survival into middle age, and subtly
suggests how this was partly due to a revitalising,
reticent uxorious passion in response to his wife’s
devotion to him. Yet it also hints at how the discoveries
themselves kept him alive, perhaps even suggesting that
he physically imploded into a dark star of pure cerebral
force, while his fragile frame had to bear a daunting
emotional burden. Redmayne’s performance also shows
how the famous electronic voice box liberated him – and
how that synthetic voice, with its sing-song robotic tone,
enigmatically conceals what he is really thinking and
feeling.
Advertisement
The basic story has been recounted in that Cumberbatch
TV film and in a recent documentary by Stephen
Finnigan, Hawking. The brilliant young mathematician
at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the early 1960s is starting
44
THE CLAPPER 2016 - 2017