Film Of The Week:

Eddie Redmayne’s wonderful and almost uncanny performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything has already won him a Golden Globe and deservedly so. You can be cynical about these things – actors who play people with a physical or mental disability are often favoured by ‘the academy’ – but this is truly an Oscar-winning performance which should ensure the star of Les Miserables and Pillars of the Earth is a favourite to take home that statuette as well.

Largely based on Hawking’s first wife, Jane’s book – Travelling Into Infinity – the film details their meeting as young adults, through to their marriage and parenting of three children and then to the demise of their marriage after he left her for his new carer. I have to admit complete ignorance about Hawking’s origins. I didn’t know he’d been able-bodied until his early 20s when he started to deteriorate and sought medical advice when his feet started to give way underneath him. So it’s interesting to see who he was before he became a household name for not only his brilliance in cosmology but his computerised mode of talking.

Jim Marsh, who’s mainly known for documentaries such as Man on Wire, directs the film sensitively and without trying to be too flashy. Quirky atheist, Stephen, meets Jane – a firm believer in God – at Cambridge University and we see the offbeat charm and humour of the former so that it’s understandable why she fell in love with him. Then after his diagnosis of a motor neuron disease, Jane married him even though he’d been given just two years to live (a prediction that was obviously way off).

As this is from Jane Hawking’s book, it’s obviously going to be sympathetic towards her, and as played by Felicity Jones she’s certainly a strong woman who takes on the full-time care of her husband and their three kids with untiring dedication. It’s not surprising then that when she meets a warm and kind man at choir practice (Charlie Cox), who helps her care for her helpless husband, feelings start to develop between them. 

Some viewers might feel that The Theory of Everything doesn’t go into enough detail about the theory that Hawking developed and tested, but this isn’t a story about black holes and big bangs so much as it is a story of enduring love, and in that regard it works pretty successfully.

by Vicki Englund