"Only time, whatever that may be, will tell"

Rating: 7/10 (8 December 2014)

"The Theory of Everything" is worth seeing for anyone with a basic interest in Stephen Hawking. A pretty nice job of juxtaposing Hawking's scientific breakthroughs with his own (and everyone else's) human relations is its strongest suit. Eddie Redmayne's performance as this difficult-to-portray character is outstanding: He captures the disabled Hawking's perceptions and point of view very well. The film is slow but evenly paced, with a quiet humor throughout. Yet, the transitions are jerky and abrupt in many places, and we don't really see Jane's reasons for attraction to him, nor how, when, and why the marriage fails. Like many other things here, it all happens suddenly and randomly for no apparent reason. This may have been at least partly deliberate, as universal happenstance is another theme here, but still. . . The time-frames toward the end are also a little unclear, and there is little age-progression in most of the major characters.
As others have noted, there is relatively little about Hawking's science in this film, and what there is is pretty basic. "The Theory of Everything" is not meant, of course, as a detailed exposé of singularity theory; however, just a bit more in this area would help to illustrate some of the more personal themes here. Most of the dialogue is also pretty ordinary: "The Theory of Everything" keeps trying to reach for a depth that it never quite achieves. In a number of places, it stops just as things start to get interesting. It seems that the directors of this film were faced with a common dilemma faced when all the central characters are still with us and likely to be among the first viewers: They were making a film centered mostly on the Hawkings' personal life but were compelled to avoid getting TOO personal.
Anyway, the theater concession stand attendant told me that she loves everything about this film, as many other people obviously do, so my reasons for being disappointed by certain parts of it are clearly not shared by everyone out there.