Watched: The Theory of Everything (2014).
This was a strange film, marked by incredible performances and a script that often felt muddled at best. Eddie Redmayne is transformational in the truest sense of the word, here - you’re never once reminded that he’s actually a handsome young actor inhabiting the role of Stephen Hawking, and as the film charts the spread of the effects of Hawking’s motor neurone disease, Redmayne occupies the role with dignity and a great deal of character. Felicity Jones is similarly charismatic - she’s really the window into the film, and a lot of the emotional beats of the film belong to her.
That’s largely where the film fell down for me, though, narratively speaking - it’s based on Jane Wilde’s memoir about her marriage to Hawking, and as such it’s rooted in her experience even as the major events of Hawking’s life play out. That’s not to say that the relationship between the two is important - it is, absolutely - but so are Hawking’s discoveries, and a lot of the script tended to focus on the pitfalls of living with a genius, rather than the intrinsic quality of genius itself.
There’s also this weird obsession throughout the film about what Hawking’s discoveries have to say about God (answer: really not much, unless you’re reaching), and it’s presented as a genuinely insightful discussion, rather than the emotional twaddle that it is. Hawking, an atheist, is blunt on the topic when it comes up, but he’s never one to raise it - and it’s moments like these, where the script and camera’s sympathies clearly lie with Wilde, that are the hardest to take seriously. It’s less that Hawking’s discoveries raise metaphysical questions - they do, I guess - and more that the actual science is so oversimplified and understated that, based on this film, you’d be fooled into thinking that Hawking isn’t that smart after all.
Maybe I’m being hypercritical, though - and, it’s worth saying, there’s a possibility that I’m discounting Wilde’s perspective far more than I should. Regardless of where the flaws lie, though, the performances in this are marked by brilliance, and it’s worth seeing for those alone.