Old Yorker

James Marsh (2014)

It starts in Cambridge at the beginning of 1963. Stephen Hawking, a doctoral student there, does some homework on the back of the previous year’s railway timetable which, his tutor points out, is now a few weeks out of date.  There’s no mention or evidence, though, of the famously severe English winter of that year, the ‘big freeze’ that continued until early March – unless James Marsh intends meteorological irony when Stephen meets undergraduate Jane Wilde at a party where Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’ is playing.   In fact, ‘Heatwave’ wasn’t released in the US until the summer of 1963, by which time Stephen is hospitalised and diagnosed with motor neurone disease.  Jane, as she makes an anxious phone call to the hospital, is wearing a band on her ring finger – the ring then disappears from her hand until she and Stephen get married (two years later).  The Theory of Everything is, in other words, far from scrupulous about the accuracy of its details but is it negligent in larger ways?  Marsh’s movie, although well received by many critics, has been reprimanded by plenty of others – both for short-changing Hawking’s theoretical physics and for pussyfooting around the difficulties of his thirty-year marriage to Jane.  I don’t really get the first of these complaints.  You would expect, in a biopic about a performer, to experience what made her or him a remarkable performer.  You wouldn’t expect, in a biopic of, say, Dickens, coverage of the characters or the themes of his novels:  you would go to the original works for those.  What you expect of The Theory of Everything is that it does justice to the personality of Stephen Hawking and conveys an idea of what has made him – a man given two years to live more than half a century ago – keep thinking, working and intellectually discovering.

Whether James Marsh is sufficiently probing in dramatising the partnership at the heart of his film is less easy to decide.  In an interview with Radio Times a couple of weeks ago, Jane Wilde Hawking acknowledged that she couldn’t – in the light of the huge success of A Brief History of Time especially – genuflect to her genius husband as people who didn’t live with and care for him every day could.  The Theory of Everything is very clearly concerned with Jane as much as with Stephen.  The subtitle on the film’s poster is ‘the extraordinary story of Jane and Stephen Hawking’; the screenplay by Anthony McCarten is based on Jane’s published memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen; the story gets underway with these two people meeting for the first time.  There’s always liable to be a tension between a warts-and-all treatment and the subject of a biographical film being still around to see it; and, in this case, there are two subjects, both of them, for different reasons, deserving of admiration.  Once Jane has made clear to Stephen that she loves him and wants to be with him in spite of his illness, there’s not a lot of conversation between them in the film about the difficulties of their relationship.  It may well be that Marsh and McCarten are being evasive in this respect but the result is nevertheless effective.  Given how much can go unsaid for years in many less extraordinary marriages, the Hawkings’ reticence is believable:  you can see that Jane would feel guilty, having said that his physical condition doesn’t matter, about changing and speaking her mind; that Stephen realises but can’t reduce what she’s coping with.   There’s also a particular and dramatically convincing reason for the couple’s few words:  Hawking’s declining powers of speech vanished altogether as a consequence of the life-saving tracheotomy he was given when he contracted pneumonia in the mid-1980s.  The speech synthesiser that produces what is now the unmistakable ‘Hawking voice’ wasn’t available immediately.  This resulted in a period of enforced silence:  Hawking communicated chiefly by raising his eyebrows to choose letters on a spelling board.  If communication becomes a technically challenging process, that’s a good reason for rationing what’s said.

Jane Wilde Hawking explained in the Radio Times piece her regret that the eldest of their three children had to shoulder, from a young age, some of the burden of Stephen’s condition and its effect on Jane.  The Theory of Everything completely ignores this element (and the children, whose changing appearance has supplied the viewer with a rough guide to the passage of time, unhelpfully disappear for much of the film’s second hour).  James Marsh does, however, get across that the extraordinariness of Stephen’s mind is both crucial and irrelevant to the survival of the marriage.  When Stephen is struck down by pneumonia, during a trip abroad, a doctor asks Jane if he should perform the tracheotomy without which Stephen will die.  The doctor adds that he may not survive anyway and that, if he does, his quality of life will be further compromised.  Jane’s response is immediate and definite:  the operation must be carried out because Stephen must live.   The imperatives make sense because he and she have invested so much effort in enabling not only Stephen’s survival but also the development of his scientific research and academic career.  At the same time, Marsh captures the exhausting, erosive nature of the couple’s situation – in Jane’s outburst of frustration, as they drive back from a weekend with Stephen’s parents, at his insistence that everything’s OK, in a powerful later moment when you feel her self-reproachful weariness that Stephen and her caring for him are lasting so much longer than she expected or can bear.   (The film doesn’t speculate how much or how little Hawking’s longevity is a triumph of mind over matter; Jane’s Radio Times interview suggests that the atypical form of his motor neurone disease has been a major factor in his survival.)

David Denby, in his largely favourable review in the New Yorker, finds that:

‘[Hawking’s] relationships with women in general here are baffling. We’re puzzled by the black hole in his character that causes him, after twenty-five years of loving marriage, to leave the devoted, accomplished, and beautiful Jane for a young nurse  … who treats him like a baby, and dominates him.’

I didn’t find this puzzling and, while I may be misinterpreting Stephen Hawking’s motivation, I liked the fact that James Marsh’s direction left me free to interpret.  In a film that’s exceptionally well cast and acted, however large or small the part, Maxine Peake’s playing of the nurse – Elaine Mason, who became Hawking’s second wife – is, at first, rather too emphatic:  she makes a play for Stephen very obviously.  But Elaine’s warmth and humour then come through – strongly enough for you to feel the impact they’re having on the man she’s caring for.  It seemed to me that he was happier with Elaine around, partly because it’s her job to look after him (so that there’s none of the guilt he may feel about Jane’s devoting herself to his needs), partly because Elaine is fun – whereas Jane is too tired to be that any more.

The science writer Dennis Overbye complains in the New York Times that:

‘… the movie doesn’t deserve any prizes for its drive-by muddling of Dr Hawking’s scientific work, leaving viewers in the dark about exactly why he is so famous. Instead of showing how he undermined traditional notions of space and time, it panders to religious sensibilities about what his work does or does not say about the existence of God, which in fact is very little.’

I think the film supplies a broad idea of Hawking’s originality that’s sufficient to enlighten viewers who don’t already know something about this.  Overbye’s other strictures miss the point that the implications for theistic belief of her husband’s work mattered a good deal to Jane Hawking, a religious believer, and therefore matter in the film.  James Marsh handles this very well.  Jane is anxious for there to be a place for God in Hawking’s universe:  she eagerly overinterprets the famous conclusion to A Brief History of Time with its reference to the ‘mind of God’[1].  At the same time, you get a sense that religion is important to Jane because it’s something that can belong to her personally, in an existence dominated by Stephen’s medical needs, scientific reputation and increasing celebrity.  Jane’s joining a church choir, at her mother’s suggestion, is a definite expression of a religiously flavoured refuge from life with Stephen.  The feelings she then develops for the widowed choirmaster, Jonathan Jones (to whom she’s now been married for some years), are a more complex and conflicting aspect of this world of her own.

Marsh is sometimes too visually fancy for his own good.  Early on, a camera movement from below a winding Cambridge staircase draws attention to itself pointlessly.  Lecturing in America through his speech synthesiser, Hawking sees a student in the front row drop a pen and imagines returning it to her:  the moment might work if the imagination were matter of fact but Marsh opts instead for a souped-up, slo-mo fantasy of Hawking’s rising from his wheelchair to pick up and hand back the pen.  However, the replaying near the end of key images from the story – although it’s a cliché – is very pleasing:  the images appear here in reverse chronological order (except that the tracheotomy follows Hawking’s collapse from pneumonia), mirroring the hero’s long-held desire to run time backwards to its very beginning.  The family’s attendance at a ceremony at which the Queen makes Hawking a Companion of Honour supplies uninspired bookends to the film (I don’t understand why he refused a knighthood after accepting the CH and, before that, a CBE, but no matter).  There are some creaky, predictably done scenes:  the false suspense of the outcome of Hawking’s PhD viva; a lecture to a group of distinguished physicists, one of whom storms out in disgust before the rest give Hawking a standing ovation; a stolen kiss between Jane and Jonathan at the end of a choir practice; the cross-cutting between their camping holiday with the Hawking children and Stephen falling dangerously ill in France.  When Jane is delighted to find the ‘mind of God’ reference in the manuscript of A Brief History of Time, she begs Stephen to let her experience what for her is a moment of great happiness.  He makes it a very short moment by promptly telling his wife that Elaine, instead of her, will be accompanying him on a lecture tour to America:  it’s possible that James Marsh and Anthony McCarten mean to show Hawking being cruel here but more likely, I’d guess, that the two things have been clumsily put together.

But there’s a larger number of scenes – particularly in the first hour of the film – that are fresh and persuasive:  Jane and Stephen’s conversation at the May Ball, with fireworks going off literally and metaphorically, and his astronomical talk that makes for an amusingly distinctive courtship; the heavy fall that lands Stephen in hospital, the delivery of the doctor’s stunning diagnosis and Stephen’s revelation to Brian, his Cambridge friend and fellow physicist, of the nature of his illness;  Jane’s insistence that she and Stephen play croquet and the desperate, uncoordinated vigour with which he then plays.  Strong later sequences include Jonathan’s first visit to the Hawking home for dinner and his surprising opening up to Stephen, when the two men are alone in the garden after the meal:  it’s as if Jonathan finds an odd security in expressing his feelings to someone unlikely to say much in response but is still a little unnerved by the bright, appraising eye looking back at him.  Another fine bit comes when Jane first tries the spelling board with Stephen and, running through the correspondence between particular colours and letters of the alphabet, twice forgets, to his great frustration, to include yellow.

Anthony McCarten’s dialogue is consistently strong and individualised, and the film features some excellent supporting performances.  Charlie Cox is splendid as Jonathan:  affably hesitant and courteous, slightly dull but attractive to Jane, not just because he’s good-looking but because he’s so uncomplicated compared with Stephen.  As Brian (a fictional character), Harry Lloyd strikes the right balance between casual joshing and concerned affection for Stephen, in a role that could have been mere filler.  It’s a pleasure to see David Thewlis back with a beautifully nuanced interpretation of Hawking’s doctoral supervisor, Dennis Sciama.  (The aging make-up for Lloyd and Thewlis is unobtrusively good.)  Emily Watson is intelligently sympathetic in the small role of Jane’s mother; more surprisingly, Simon McBurney is convincing in the larger one of Stephen’s father, Frank, an eminent medic.  The continuing tension between him and Jane – who, as a modern linguist, is seen by Frank as intellectually infra dig – is nicely caught.  It’s a pity that Abigail Cruttenden, as Hawking’s mother, has so few lines but there are well-judged cameos from Adam Godley (as the doctor who gives the bad news to twenty-two-year-old Stephen) and Christian McKay (as Roger Penrose).  Supporting the action and the actors is a score by Johann Johannsson which, although sometimes obvious, is layered enough to outclass the music for most of this year’s award-contending films.   But The Theory of Everything is essentially about two characters and its success depends on the playing of them.

Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking has been compared to Daniel Day Lewis’s in My Left Foot – a large compliment in itself.  Redmayne is at a disadvantage in that the superior script for My Left Foot not only characterised Christy Brown sharply but also gave him qualities – a sensual appetite, a bloody-minded fury – that enabled Day Lewis to make Brown insolently dynamic and ensure the viewer never pitied him.   But Eddie Redmayne does have the advantage of portraying Stephen Hawking before as well as after illness strikes.  The physical achievement of what he does when Hawking loses the ability to walk or sit and is gnarled in his wheelchair is remarkable but Redmayne is wonderful too in what he creates in the early stages of the film.  He combines gaucheness with sharpness of mind and a laconic, abrupt charm – his crooked gait and halting speech patterns anticipate what’s to come.  In the very well orchestrated scene of Jane’s debut Sunday lunch at the Hawkings’, Redmayne illustrates brilliantly (looking through and over his spectacles) how part of Stephen is steeped and easy in a family routine that’s strange and potentially intimidating to Jane, while another part of him is communicating with her privately and reassuringly.  Redmayne makes the most of his opportunities once Stephen is immobilised but still able to speak:  Stephen utters only a few remarks when Jonathan first comes for dinner but they are killer one-liners – a gift to the actor.  In most of his screen roles to date, Eddie Redmayne has radiated good-naturedness (as he does in television interviews).  I’d wondered if he might be too ‘nice’ to play the reputedly brash, as well as heroic, Stephen Hawking.  Since they’re disinclined to be negative about Hawking (or his wife), James Marsh and Anthony McCarten could be accused of not giving their leading man enough to work on – even of relying on his natural rapport with the audience to see them through.  It’s to Redmayne’s credit that, reduced eventually to one eye and a mouth, he uses both to make Hawking charismatic and ambiguous (and more charismatic because he’s ambiguous).

Redmayne was thirty-two when the film was made and Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, a year his junior.  Both pass easily for much younger and seem very right in the early scenes.  Redmayne doesn’t appear to age much – or, at least, not conventionally – as the years go by:  this too seems right, both in relation to the real Stephen Hawking and as an indication of the man’s dauntlessness.  In contrast, the bloom disappears from Felicity Jones’s face.  It’s this, much more than changes of hairstyle or clothes, that show time passing and the years of life with Stephen weighing on Jane.  Jones isn’t an obviously exciting actress but she’s amazingly precise in registering, facially and vocally, a character’s feelings and shifts in mood.  Her expressive range is perfect for this role:  Jane is a woman who not only tends not to speak her mind fully – she won’t even let herself think some things.  Felicity Jones does a superb job of describing Jane’s love for and loyalty to Stephen and a warring, claustrophobic regret for the years that she’s given away to him.  In a less eye-catching role than Redmayne’s, Jones emulates him in establishing a personality so strongly in the early stages that the memory of it is persistent and poignant later in the film.  An exchange between Jane and Stephen’s father, shortly after the illness has been diagnosed, could be dismissed as an example of how The Theory of Everything tends to take the heartwarming option whenever it can.  Frank Hawking warns that ‘This will not be a fight – it will be a very heavy defeat’.  Later in the conversation, Jane tells him she’s ready and determined to fight the disease with Stephen.  His father doesn’t then say to her (as he probably would have), ‘Didn’t you hear what I just told you?’  (Frank continues to believe that his son, in his choice of girlfriend, could have done academically better for himself.)  Yet the scene is strong, thanks to the pure-hearted conviction that Felicity Jones brings to her lines – along with a bristling irritation that Stephen’s father is treating her like a fool.

7 January 2015

[1] ‘However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we would know the mind of God.’