In Les Miserables, Eddie Redmayne sang a song called “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. In The Theory of Everything, playing Stephen Hawking, Redmayne might very well have changed the words to “Missing Answers to Begging Questions.”
Redmayne and co-star Felicity Jones, who portrays Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, do a fine job but director James Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarter go heavy on visual detail but seem reluctant to provide exposition on important matters. Little effort is made to explain Stephen or Jane’s motives regarding life decisions. Confirmation of Stephen’s awareness or possible endorsement of Jane’s possible dalliance with a kind choirmaster (Charlie Cox) is left up in the air. The script, based on Wilde’s memoir, Travelling To Infinity,” counts on Jones’ ability to nonverbally suggest her frustrations with her devotion to Hawking but that proves to be too much to ask. When Stephen later, after 25 years of marriage, decides to leave Jane for a nurse who is attentive but dictatorial, we have little idea what in his makeup caused this. As viewers, we shouldn’t need to go outside the film for biographical explanations.
What the film does right is give a feel for Hawking’s interesting mix of awkwardness and brashness. His courtship of Jane while they were students at Cambridge in 1963, was the result of a nerdy yet highly determined and confidant young man. His vision included wanting to find “one single equation that explains everything in the universe.” After receiving a diagnosis of ALS that will give him at most two years to live, he pushes Jane away. She withstand his efforts and marries him. The Theory of Everything is as much or more about Jane’s tremendous perseverance as it is about Hawking’s.
Three children later (the film also does little to give much sense of Hawking’s relationship with his children) Hawking is lighting up the world of cosmology. His mentor (David Thewlis) gets him meetings with distinguished experts and Hawking dazzles them. Through his trials and tribulations, Hawking maintains an extraordinary sense of humor. When a friend asks Hawking, when he could still speak a little, whether his affliction “affects everything,” Hawking replies, “Different system.” It would have been nice if Marsh and McCarten discovered a different system in their filmmaking for what is indeed a very interesting subject.
Traveling to Infinity: A Missing Probe….3 (out 5 stars)