Based on the book by Stephen Hawking’s wife Jane Hawking, this film tells the story about Hawking’s life and their marriage but in a superficial and drab way. It’s a decent movie, but I would wait to rent it.
Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a genius astrophysicist student at Oxford who falls in love with Jane (Felicity Jones). He gets diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) while at Oxford and is told he has only about 2 years to live. Jane sticks by him anyway. They get married and eventually have three kids.
The acting is excellent by the two leads. Although Redmayne is getting all the kudos, I thought Jones was even better!
The movie covers Hawking’s physical deterioration while he also rises to fame, developing the Black Hole/Big Bang Theory of the Universe and then discarding it for a more encompassing one that he never fully completed. He remained an atheist throughout, which was one marital conflict that was apparent, although not developed. Hawking was trying to discover “a single elegant equation” that would integrate quantum theory and relativity theory, which would then be the “Theory of Everything,” but he couldn’t solve the problem. (Neither could anybody else so far, either.)
The movie disappoints mainly because we only glimpse the surface of their marriage – we primarily observe Jane being Hawking’s caretaker and his emotional support while Hawking feels somewhat guilty about being such a burden
One of my closest friends (who doesn’t write a movie blog but easily could) ranks this film in his top 5 for the year, so perhaps I’m being harsh.
Which leads me to disclose my “Theory of Everything” which is that “Everything is Subjective!”
Rating 7.0 – solid rental but borderline choice for the BS.
Dave
