A new year; another biopic. After the disappointment of The Imitation Game, I was a bit worried that James Marsh's chronicle of the life of Stephen Hawking might fall into some of the same traps. Here is another study of a brilliant but troubled Cambridge academic, an awards-bait vehicle for its young male British star. But thankfully, that's where the similarities end. The Theory of Everything is a surprisingly wonderful take on Hawking's first marriage, a relationship extraordinary in its rarity yet all too painfully human.
This is a transformative moment for Eddie Redmayne, perhaps best known until now for his work in Les Misérables and My Week With Marilyn. He excels in the daunting task of playing the world-famous physicist, from his early days as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge to the later stages of his career, when his body had been ravaged by the effects of Motor Neurone Disease. It is his performance in this latter part of the film that is truly remarkable: anger, frustration, and sharp bursts of humour are rendered with the simple lift of an eyebrow, or the wry raising of a hand.
But this is not just Hawking's story; in many ways, it belongs here to his wife Jane, portrayed by Felicity Jones. Marsh's film tracks their relationship from its awkward inception at a university party (Cambridge has changed little in fifty years) to the marriage that finally cracked under its own unique strain. The early scenes, shot largely in the beautiful grounds of St John's college, are bathed in the glow of a youth that looked certain to be cut short. Hawking's crushing diagnosis handed him a two-year life expectancy, a prediction Jane staunchly refused to see as a death sentence.
It would have been easy for this film to go down the 'love is a cure' route. Yet it is a much better and more honest film for resisting it. Because love is also weak, and jealous, and has really bad days. If Redmayne is outstanding as a man essentially fighting against his own body, Jones is more than his equal as the wife who is both his partner and his carer. Her struggle for an identity of her own in this relationship is as much the film's concern as Hawking's odds-defying survival and illustrious career. Jones's performance is a masterful exercise in restraint; it hints at underlying despair yet is alive with courage.
Without resorting to sentimentality, Marsh's biopic weaves a narrative of ordinary joys and frailties from its exceptional subject matter. What finally emerges is a hope that the world in its infinite variety has space for countless ways of living, with the many kinds of happiness they might afford.
