The Theory of Everything is, quite simply, brilliant. In the same way that director Steven Soderbergh lifted Erin Brockovich from being a legal procedural TV movie to its position as a major motion picture, Oscar-winning documentary director James Marsh has taken what could have been an awkward mix of impenetrable science and a terrible disease and made a deeply human story that is moving, inspiring and so totally engaging that audiences often sit right through the end credits as they take in what they have just seen.
It is the humanity, the frailty, the warmth, the humour, the kindness and – to use a very old fashioned word for an unfashionable quality – the decency of the story, played by a faultless cast with such little apparent effort or strain, that makes The Theory of Everything the most memorable film in a rich field at this year’s Oscars.
Eddie Redmayne’s transformation from a slightly awkward ‘natural scientist’ (the traditional expression at Cambridge University for a ‘geek’) to the towering brain caught in an unco-operative body is little short of miraculous. This is not a star turn, where the dribbling is designed to win prizes for being ‘confronting’. Redmayne plays the man and not the disease. The character of Stephen Hawking stays vigorously alive as more and more of his body fails and what Jane, his wife played so delicately by Oscar-nominated Felicity Jones, fell in love with is still there in his eyes though his voice is gone, replaced by the American accent in a box that most of us have heard. His family and friends are brave, supportive and accepting. As played by Redmayne, Stephen Hawking inspires love because of the man he is, alive and laughing, inside the body he no longer controls.
A recent article in a national newspaper carried a cynical headline, asking that no more films be made about white, male, British geniuses. It was a painful bit of smartypantsness, because the two movies that could fall into that category this year are both brilliant pieces of filmmaking – the other film is The Imitation Game, for which Benedict Cummerbatch is also deservedly Oscar-nominated. Between them, these two films are likely to do more to wash away prejudice against homosexuality and the disabled than a thousand pages of legislation ever could. Their heroes are both great men, great minds and in great pain. They are treated by the writers and directors with enormous respect and played faultlessly by young actors reaching the top of their game. In the English-speaking world, the film culture has lately been dominated by endless sequels, remakes, stories based on comic books, gross-out comedies and cynical violence. The Theory of Everything proves that complex stories about real people can still be told and the audience is rewarded by the feeling that the human journey can still be an ennobling experience, in which we are not limited by our bodies, but only by the barriers we set up in our minds. Don’t miss this film.
