to make a name for himself, but also shows a worrying
tendency to clumsiness – stumbling, knocking over mugs
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.)
and their emotional web with delicacy. The title refers
to Hawking’s quest for an all-encompassing theory of
the physical universe, but the pathos of the film is that
in ordinary life, not everything can be made to fit and
make sense. Compromises must be made; people must
muddle through. It is a gentle, tender story of lovers who
found friendship during and after their marriage.
Read more at https://www.theguardian.com/
film/2015/jan/01/the-theory-of-everything-reviewstephen-hawking-biopic-gravity#img-2
THE THEORY OF
EVERYTHING: 5 REASONS
YOU MUST SEE THIS FILM
PHYSICS
DEPARTMENT
Where the film departs from the norm is in showing how
Stephen and Jane effectively converted their marriage
into something like an open relationship. Frustrated
and depressed, Jane forms an intense, ambiguous
friendship with a widower, the church choirmaster,
Jonathan Hellyer Jones, played by Charlie Cox, who joins
them on family holidays, helping Stephen as if he were
one of the children. It is a situation in which Stephen is
complaisant. Or is he? Soon he himself forms a similar,
quasi-platonic relationship with his nurse, Elaine Mason,
played by Maxine Peake, which is as intimate, or more
intimate, than the dynamics of the conjugal bed. She
does not hesitate to assert a kind of marital primacy
over Stephen. Is Stephen’s eventual choice governed by
emotional pain? It is another mystery.
For a while, this is effectively a four-way marriage: a very
un-Hollywood situation. Perhaps things were harsher and
less dignified in real life than they appear on screen. But
Redmayne, Jones, Cox and Peake portray the principals
The new Stephen Hawking biopic is generating major
awards buzz and is set to make mega-stars of its two
leads, Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne. Here’s why
you need to see it.
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