The The­o­ry of Everything

Stephen Hawk­ing may be famous for his work as a cos­mol­o­gist and the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, but James Marsh’s glossy biopic is root­ed in more earth­ly con­cerns. Based on his once-wife Jane Hawking’s 2008 mem­oir ​‘Trav­el­ling to Infin­i­ty: My Life with Stephen’, The The­o­ry of Every­thing is first and fore­most a love story.

Jane (Felic­i­ty Jones), an Anna Kari­na-esque beau­ty prepar­ing for her PhD in medieval poet­ry, and Stephen (Eddie Red­mayne), lanky, bril­liant and bespec­ta­cled, bond instant­ly. Despite their fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence of opin­ion regard­ing the mat­ter of faith (Hawk­ing describes cos­mol­o­gy as ​“a reli­gion for intel­li­gent athe­ists”), the pair spend their free time cavort­ing about the Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus, swoon­ing on bridges and flirt­ing under­neath fire­work dis­plays. That is until Stephen takes a nasty tum­ble, hit­ting his head on the con­crete with a sick­en­ing­ly vis­cer­al crack. It is revealed that Stephen has motor neu­rone dis­ease, a debil­i­tat­ing phys­i­cal con­di­tion that guar­an­tees him just two years to live.

While we know that Hawk­ing lives well beyond those two years (at time of writ­ing he is 72), Jane does not, and so the two hasti­ly tie the knot. What fol­lows is not an insight into the mind of a rare genius but instead a rare glimpse into a bit­ter­sweet mar­riage where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is both com­pli­cat­ed and key. Jones brings a steely resolve to Jane, who serves as the back­bone of the fam­i­ly, and an ever-expand­ing one at that; Marsh takes great pains to point out that Stephen’s baby-mak­ing fac­ul­ties are ful­ly-func­tion­ing. Yet this is Redmayne’s film, a star vehi­cle that offers him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case his tech­ni­cal prowess as an actor. From Stephen’s dete­ri­o­rat­ing mobil­i­ty to his even­tu­al inabil­i­ty to speak, his per­for­mance is phys­i­cal and pre­cise, but nev­er patronising.

The The­o­ry of Every­thing is cer­tain­ly more emp­ti­ly styl­ish than it per­haps need­ed to be, paint­ing the already-idyl­lic Cam­bridge in vary­ing hues of cool, smokey blue and insert­ing ​‘home videos’ of Hawk­ing and fam­i­ly as snip­pets shot on Super8. Marsh also draws visu­al links between the minu­ti­ae of Earth and the mag­ni­tude of out­er space, using con­cen­tric cir­cles to con­nect cof­fee cups with quan­tum physics in a gen­tle bid to rec­on­cile Jane’s cre­ation­ism with Stephen’s sci­ence. These direc­to­r­i­al flour­ish­es pre­vent the film from feel­ing fusty, per­haps nec­es­sary giv­en its invest­ment in straight-laced British­ness. There is an eye roll-induc­ing smug­ness to lines like ​“Can you whip some Wag­n­er on?” (deliv­ered with decid­ed­ly plum­my aplomb) – a saleable Eng­lish­ness that seems to have been tai­lor-made to be export­ed to Americans.

One sus­pects that The The­o­ry of Every­thing has the poten­tial to do what The King’s Speech did before it dur­ing awards sea­son, giv­en its pres­tige pro­duc­tion val­ues and sen­ti­men­tal source mate­r­i­al. There are rea­sons why it should; Red­mayne, Jones, DoP Benoit Delhomme’s eye for colour and tex­ture; and rea­sons why it shouldn’t; occa­sion­al lurch­es into melo­dra­ma by way of Johan Johansson’s over­bear­ing score, a cloy­ing­ly hope­ful con­clud­ing speech. Most­ly though — and most­ly thanks to Red­mayne — the film man­ages to evade mawk­ish­ness. Offer­ing wry relief in the form of Hawking’s trade­mark self-dep­re­cat­ing humour, it’s no won­der that Marsh decides to trade in mat­ters of the heart, not the head.