After a few weeks of All-American fare, this week we travelled to England for our movie fare, as well as our second annual physics movie. The Theory of Everything is a biopic about Stephen Hawking, one of the most astonishing intellects of our or any era. We’ve become familiar with him as the most unusual of media stars, with his severe disabilities and his synthesized voice, but most people are scarcely aware of him before his neurological deterioration set in, when he was young and physically active. The movie begins with Hawking as a young college student, amazing his Oxford professors and putting moves on the girl of his dreams. Before long, however, his physical decline begins, and then the shock of finding out that his problems are fatal, with 2 and a half years to live. His girl friend Jane marries him, despite the diagnosis and undertakes a life where she postpones her academic ambitions (she eventually earned a PhD too) to take care of him and raise 3 children. As we know, he has become a star, eventually divorced from his wife (amicably) and remarried for a while, to a member of his nursing staff.
Initially given a short life expectancy, Hawking continues with his physics career, and outlives all predictions. Those familiar with his theories know that he is credited with theorizing “Hawking Radiation”, in which black holes, instead of being dark, are immensely bright, gradually lose matter to neighboring space and eventually shrink. Somewhat less successful and quite possibly well beyond human intellect is his attempt at a theory of everything, which would resolve the theoretical predictability of large scale physics with the inherent random aspect of the physics of subatomic particles. Not only Hawking but other ambitious physicists are still working on this and it has not happened yet. You might get the impression that if anybody ever DID perfect the Theory of Everything, the universe might end, or time might run backward until we return to the Big Bang.
I really enjoyed this movie. It is just so ENGLISH. Not just British, but English. It has Oxford, Cambridge, bland food and alcohol with every meal, gardens, students wearing academic gowns, polite people living in very old houses, funny looking cars and even a visit with the Queen. I’m not familiar with most of the cast, but Eddie Redmayne is unbelievable as Hawking. How this man managed to spend most of the movie in a body made of skin and bones, twisting himself into an un-doable heap of limpness is beyond me. In some parts of the movie, before his famous speech synthesizer, his speech was so slurred that the movie would have benefitted from subtitles, but he manages to convey a lot, even with the minimal facial expressions that Hawking had at that time. His wife Jane, is played well by Felicity Jones, who brings a lot to the role of a long overburdened woman and wife to a growing media star who can literally do nothing for himself but somehow manages to be the father of 3 kids. The remainder of the cast is unfamiliar to me with the exception of Christian McKay, who was so good as Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles, in a surprisingly small role here as mathematician Roger Penrose. If you like physics or England or a truly fascinating and truly amazing character, this is quite a good movie. It’s low key, mainly about acting and characters. It’s hard to believe, considering his physical condition, that Hawking is not only alive, but mentally in good shape, 50 years after his death sentence. He’s one of the most amazing characters of our time.
