All of the praise, awards and box office success that has come to the creators and actors that helped to make The Theory Of Everything such a special film is without a shadow of a doubt more than deserving. It’s a superbly composed movie that provides an intimate look at the life of Professor Stephen Hawking with some of the finest acting of the year, in particular from Eddie Redmayne (My Week With Marilyn) who picked up the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as the great theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
Having hit the big screen on the 1st January 2015, following on from its premier at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 7th February 2014, it has gone on to pick up five Oscar nominations in total, along with a raft of others at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs. It was released on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download on the 11th May 2015 and if all the award nominations haven’t been enough to sway you yet, honestly you’d be missing out on a truly brilliant film.
The story starts out in the 1960s as Stephen is finishing up his PHD in astrophysics at Cambridge University, where he meets and falls in love with his future wife, literature student Jane Wilde. However, with romance blossoming and the first sparks of his big idea about the big bang starting to take shape, his life is thrown off course by the onset of motor neuron disease, which leaves him devastated at the prospect of a diagnosis that gave him just two years to live.
It makes for a heart-wrenching, but ultimately uplifting biographhy that sees the couple battling adversity to prove the odds wrong. It works well as a standalone romantic drama, but with the added interest of it centering around the life of one of the world’s most recognisable physicists it becomes a fascinating biopic that shows you that there’s a lot more to things than you might have thought.
One of the best elements of The Theory Of Everything is that it manages to sum up the phenomenal achievements Stephen Hawking has realised both in terms of his scientific discoveries and his life in general, having managed to defy predictions about a short life expectancy and continue to contribute to physics well into his 70s, fathering three children along the way. For anyone that wasn’t too sure about the scientific breakthroughs that are attributed to him, you can include the theory that black holes emit radiation (called Hawking radiation) and slowly die over time, along with the big bang theory, building on the notion that an expanding universe might be traced back in time to an originating single point first discussed by Georges Lemaître in 1927.
However, the story, written by Anthony McCarten, isn’t without its critics as it deviates slightly from accurate representation with a little creative license. It’s loosely based on Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by the real life Jane Wilde Hawking and there are a few marked differences, including making Stephen a bit sweeter in the movie than he’s indicated to be in the books and writing in that Jane discovered about Stephen’s disease after they’d been together for a while, but actually she knew about it before they started dating. However, we can kind of see why they’ve altered these two elements as they do help to make the film more engaging, and they’re far from the divergences with historical accuracy that occurred in The Imitation Game.
The whole cast is near flawless in the delivery of their characters, with Redmayne leading the way with a gifted performance as Stephen Hawking before, during and after the physical effects of his motor neuron disease took hold. It’s the subtlety of his actions and mannerisms that make it such a complete portrayal and while it slips every so slightly maybe once, on the whole you quickly think of him as the scientist himself, instead of looking at him as the Les Miserables star doing an impersonation.
Redmayne’s accomplishment in the role is matched to some extent by Felicity Jones (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), who has great range and while she’s a fair bit more Hollywood featured than the real Jane that takes little away from how strongly the performance comes across. David Thewlis (Macbeth (2015)) is as solid as ever as Stephen’s Cambridge professor, Dennis Sciama, doing well to portray him at different points in his life as he gets progressively older.
The efforts of the cast in front of the camera are added to by some stunning cinematography from director of photography, Benoît Delhomme (Lawless), behind the camera. The composition, framing and perspective are all painstakingly selected to deliver a mesmerising finish, and there’s a fair bit of visual experimentation, including some very cool elements of sepia colour tones. Although, we’re not 100% convinced about the delivery of the section that attempts to portray time going backwards.
The Theory Of Everything DVD is a must watch for anyone that missed it at the big screen with an inspirational storyline and exceptional performances on all counts, not least of all the music by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Director, James Marsh (Project Nim), has done a very good job of pulling together yet another exceptional movie, building on his previous documentary success with Man On A Wire.
The Theory Of Everything DVD review: 4/5
