Reel Look: 'The Theory of Everything'

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2015)

"There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope." From British director James Marsh's definitive storytelling (Man on Wire) and from former wife of Hawking's Jane Wilde's book 'Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen' unfolds the beautiful, bittersweet tale of an extraordinary human being with an extraordinary mind of whom would revolutionize the world of theoretical physiology and cosmology as we know it and of whom cherished life's most precious gift: time itself. Does time play a main character in and of itself as does Redmayne Dr. Hawking? Let's take a look.
Dr. Stephen Hawking is played to a demanding, poignant and nuanced perfection by a bravura performance delivered by Eddie Redmayne (Les Misérables). From prestigious beginnings at Cambridge University in the early 1960's, to falling in love with the beautiful church-going Jane Wilde played by Felicity Jones (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) to encountering Lou Gehrig's disease later on, he earns his doctorate in cosmetology, marries and becomes a father, only being told by a doctor he had two years left to live. Through this, we with Hawking begin to see and sense the world as he does for the two hours we spend with him: we laugh, we emote concern and get a lump in our throats when we see this unshakable human being embrace his fate and choose to live even more so than ever before. His wife also chooses to love him despite what is going to take over his body, but raising children and taking care of his personal needs grows wearisome. Help comes in the form of a church choir leader named Jonathan Hellyer Jones(Charlie Cox), a kindly man of whom lost his wife to leukemia a year prior. Eventually he becomes as one of the members of the Hawking family, teaching the children piano to sharing a holiday on the beach through a voyeur's eye of a Super 8 lens. Though permanently confined in a wheelchair with his condition worsening, and with only an American computer to speak for him after his voice is lost due to muscle tissue damage in the throat, Hawking decides to write his bestseller A Brief History of Time. He goes to America with his personal nurse Elaine,leaving Jane to stay with Jonathan, of which they started showing mutual feelings towards each other and would prefer the children have a new father who will help Jane with her tasks in parenthood as well. Despite all the fame and fortune one could ever receive in a lifetime, no one can ever buy back the untouchable, vast entity that is time. We either have too much or either too little. It is invisible yet all around us at every waking moment. Though we can never touch or grab more in our clutches and store it away in a vault for the future, through the bespectacled "always dirty" but rose-colored glasses, Hawking can smile despite his disease and accepts it for what it is, as we do when we watch him conjugate ineffable theoretic notions of galaxies and black holes while also keeping an edge of humor to nourish and enlighten the lives and souls of those and around him. In this bittersweet story of love, loss and life itself, time does indeed have its way of changing the world and people around us, but is never able to penetrate the will of appreciating every moment for what it is truly worth. So...'A Beautiful Mind' meets 'My Left Foot'? Maybe, maybe not. For me, spending two hours in a theater watching the life a paralyzed genius unfold was a very brief history in time indeed, but a truly memorable one spent at that, and, at age 73, the life of Dr. Hawking still continues to go onward even still.