Average Love Story, Below Average Hawking Biography

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2015)

Finally finished watching The Theory of Everything last night. It's a pretty good movie, worth watching, but at the same time it's a bit disappointing. The title of the movie suggests that more attention would be given to Hawking's actual theory, but this entire movie is about his relationship with his wife, and even in that it falls short of the sentimentality needed to carry a good love story. They get together so quickly that we really don't understand his wife's attraction to him or why she falls so deeply in love with him so immediately that she's willing to sacrifice the rest of her life taking care of a severely handicapped person. I don't mind a good love story, but then call it The Theory of Love or something. Hawking isn't portrayed as especially brilliant. Sure, there's a few scenes where he wins an award, presents his theories to his peers and receives praise, writes his famous book, but these things just happen in the film in a matter of seconds and then they are over and we're back to his wife spoon feeding him or what the next upgrade to his wheelchair is going to be. We're never really allowed inside his mind to get a sense of the brilliance that is going on. I give Eddie Redmayne huge props for pulling off the acting job that he did, but doing so within the confines of such a lazy script makes this a rather good story about a disabled person who is lucky enough to have someone who loves and cares for him, but not a good movie about Stephen Hawking.