The Theory of Everything - Cheap Thoughts

The Theory of Everything was one of the highest praised films of last year, nominated for multiple academy awards, winning for Best Actor with Eddie Redmayne. The film follows the story of a young Stephen Hawking in the prime of his life when he is diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease, paralysing his entire body slowly over the next few years and the struggles he dealt with in his personal life because of it. Like I said, Redmayne's performance here is supposedly Oscar worthy and...yeah it is. The slow decline of this once lively fella is subtle yet highly effective, first his fingers start going limp, then he stumbles slightly while walking and slowly progresses to not being able to move at all. Redmayne completely disappears into the role and he absolutely deserved his trophy. Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking (Stephen's Wife) was also nominated for a complex and believable role as Hawking's wife, standing by his side but also facing her own struggles of trying to look after her sick husband, raise a family and strive for her own passion make her an interesting character. It could have been so easy to mess this role up and make her seem selfish and whiney, but you connect to her because you see how much effort she is putting into it and how long she keeps her suffering to herself. Sadly in comparison to Redmayne who did have the tougher role, Jones's performance does feel less stellar in comparison.

The directing is very well done, each shot of the film has wonderful composition and feels like i'm looking at a painting, the score can sometimes feel a little too whimsical at moments and i feel like they may have exaggerated certain elements of Hawking's life just to make it more interesting on screen. Which to be fair a lot of films do that, but they usually keep it in the realm of feeling realistic as if it could happen, this film was clearly stretching my point of disbelief by a biopic standards.

But then there is the story where i begin to waver on the film. My problem lies with the focus, Stephen Hawking is a very interesting person, he's a genius trapped in a shell that is his body, the world's greatest brain in a broken body, yet the focus of the movie is on his relationship and family life. Now there is no problem in having a movie based around someone's personal life when dealing with a disability, but when you're movie is about Stephen Hawking I would expect it to be focused on the qualities that make him so fascinating. Very little focus is given on his intellect and scientific discoveries and whenever they do, it almost feels as it's just there to give us a reminder that he's a scientist. Or maybe make it a story about a man overcoming his disability to leave his great impact on the world, he's told he will have 2 years to live, yet we clearly see him surpass that in the film, as he does in real life, and no explanation is given to how he surpassed it, no one even so much as points out that he lived longer than expected. Showing how it affects his personal life would make an interesting B-Plot and humanise him more in showing the day to day struggles, which the film does do, but having that be the entire focus makes it lose that sense of purpose about making this a film about Stephen Hawking.

All other issues i have are completely minor, the first one being the use of montages to show the passage of time by using home videos, except the only way how they differentiate between diegetic shots and the filmic shots is by simply adding a layer of fuzz on top of the picture quality and even then, that is still really good quality for a home video camera from the 1960s. The other issue i'm sure is accurate to what it was like in real life, but even then it seems like a dumb idea, if you have a disabled body in your house, why would you buy a house with stairs? That just seems impractical. Also as a northern lad, born & raised, i felt sick by how posh everyone was behaving in this film "ma makes a cracking roast" made me throw up a little.

To sum it up, Theory of Everything has some amazing performances, great directing and while the story is still well paced and well told, it feels a little bit too standard when talking about one of the greatest men alive. I'm giving The Theory of Everything a 7/10.

-Danny