Oscar-baity film-making at its finest!

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2019)

"The Theory of Everything" has everything to please the Academy, and not just in theory. Indeed, if someone tells me that James Marsh directed this movie without dreaming of the Oscars, I'll pull a Michael Corleone and say: "now who's being naÃ¯ve?"
This film is a school-case; it features all the boxes to tick for the Oscars: a contemporary biopic? Check. British celebrity? Double check. A world-wide known character? Check. Intelligent? Check. Disabled? Triple-check. A dysfunctional family drama spanning three decades? A climactic discovery? An inspirational speech? The story of Stephen Hawking was begging for a movie adaptation because this is the kind of performances that will never go unnoticed, and I bet Eddie Redmayne could already choose the spot in his cupboard for the Oscar the day he signed the script.
And like Sean Penn who took away Mickey Rourke's only possible shot at the Oscars, Eddie Redmayne took it from Michael Keaton. Remember when "Birdman" came out, it was all about Keaton until "The Theory of Everything" raised its little head and every Academy pundit knew it was over for Batman, 'Robin' would steal his thunder. Serves him for not playing a tragic inspirational real-life figure, that's the lesson we learned from Rourke's loss. Just look at all the winners in the past 10 years: Winston Churchill, Hugh Glass, Abraham Lincoln, George VI, Amin Dada, Truman Capote, fictional characters never really pay off.
And you can't even blame the Academy, Eddie Redmayne is actually the best thing about the film, his performance really makes you believe this is Stephen Hawking resurrecting as a young freshman and then slowly descending into the condition that made him such a pop culture icon celebrated in "The Simpsons" and "The Big Bang Theory". And the film showed a fascinating aspect about Stephen: for someone who didn't believe in God, he exemplified the idea that God gives when he takes away and Lou Gehrig's disease was so great a handicap He could only compensate it by making Hawking the greatest mind of the twentieth century, second to Einstein.
But I digress because the film, while celebrating Hawking' achievement, also focuses on his family life with Jane. Felicity Jones is good as the all-loving but then long-suffering wife, highlighting a sort of bipolar temptation from the film. It tries to be two things at the same time: "A Beautiful Mind" and "My Left Foot", it's far better than the former which relied on misleading thrills to make Nash' life more interesting, but maybe I wished it dared a little more and could plunge us in the mind of the genius, or focus on the internal battle between his inner self (he wasn't an isolated nerd but a lazy, easygoing fellow), his struggle to understand the universe and make himself understood.
That mental exploration was the kind of stunts I expect from movies about intelligent or visionary people, to make you feel more intelligent, but the treatment is rather superficial because the story is busy swinging back and forth between drama and science, to insist on the woman behind the great man. So it all comes to a simple question: are we interested? If so, to what extent? It's always nice to have the external insight but this is why I was so critical at the film's conventional aspect (it's an Oscar baity film if I ever saw one), it should have kept Jones as a supporting character and be more focused on Hawking's world, Jones was a comforting and important presence but she wasn't pivotal in his achievements.
So just when we have a glimpse on his genius and the film seems to take off to some realms of intellectual celebrations, we have the domestic life back again, problem with the kids, with the family, the gossips, the gas bills... this is a man who's contemplating the universe, the big bang, time and we have to endure the peripheral aspects, it's like someone pointing out to the moon and we have to endure the finger. I didn't hate that approach, overall, the treatment was well done but it fell flat. If Marsh anted to highlight that aspect, maybe he needed an extra hour because I didn't care much for Felicity Jones.
Or maybe I should retract that bit, the first parts did annoy me in the sense that the love story looked like a retread of "A Beautiful Mind", it became interesting when he lot the ability to speak and the marriage went downhill. However; we never feel the real transition between happy and sad Jane. So to end on a comparison, the film manages to be a sort 2010s "Pride of the Yankees": the man's popular then there's the illness, relatives coping with them and the final speech, of course, this time, he survives but the couple falls apart. It's all done well when it comes to biopic about such tormented characters, you expect more.
It's like Redmayne was trapped in that wheelchair and could only stick to Hawking's mimics in order to guarantee his Oscar, it was his zone of comfort, Jones was the actress who went beyond the limit of a two-dimensional role and gave it a poignant aura and the film could take its way to the Oscars, it played it safe and succeeded admirably by grabbing the Best Actor Oscar.

At least, "Birdman" tried something new and got the Best Picture. But the film seems to equate the award with a series of parameters cohabiting with harmony, I guess I can say it's a great Oscar-bait movie, it's a very limited way to look at it, but still better than being a bad Oscar one. And I just realized James Marsh had won the Oscar with "Man On Wire", so he's capable of making inspirational movies with a uniqueness of their own.