The Theory of Everything

This is a movie about Jane and Stephen and not about theoretical physics. Once you get that out of the way, The Theory of Everything is an absorbing film about an exceptional couple who balance love, marriage, children and ill health, and are still highly productive and well regarded as professionals.

It is a very personal film about a very public scientist, Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne), and his then wife, Jane Wilde Hawking (Felicity Jones), a professor of Romance Languages. The film focuses on the personality of Professor Hawking and the challenges he faces as the motor neuron disease he suffers from gradually disables him. Yet it keeps perspective on the disability and never allows it to take over the aesthetics and drama of the movie; just as Professor Hawking never allowed his illness to take over his scientific temper, his sense of humour or his robust sexuality.

It is also, of course, a very English film, and the intelligence sustaining world of British academia, its appreciation of eccentricities and the unconditional support it gives to exceptional talent, all come out clearly.

When this cloistered world of ideas places the intellect above the material and the corporeal, it allows the mind to soar above the body. In essence, this is the singular achievement of Hawking, his ability to separate his free-wheeling mind from his crippled body; to then give us an understanding of time and a cosmology that unites the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.

The film also shows that Hawking, far from being a typical absent-minded professor, is a very media-savvy man, and the deliberate choice of the word ‘Brief’ in his A Brief History of Time is an indication of what he makes of our racy reading public.

In short, this is an almost perfect movie about an almost perfect professor.

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Ajit Duara