A great performance in an interesting biopic - but maybe a little too respectful.

Rating: 6/10 (1 August 2019)

Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for his performance as the cruelly disabled Stephen Hawking in this film, and you can see why. He has mastered amazingly the contortions and ticks that advancing Motor Neurone Disease inflicted upon the increasingly famous cosmologist. But his depiction of Hawking's earlier days at Cambridge is also impressive, helped by careful attention to detail and also by a fairly strong physical resemblance.
Sadly, though, this performance alone cannot make for a great film. The story here is not really about Hawking's scientific breakthroughs, nor about his perhaps less appreciated role in popularising science with his hugely successful books; but mainly it centres in his first marriage to Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. Hers is also a bravura performance, but, as many people have noted, she does not appear to age over the decades' span of the story.
The real problem though is a nagging feeling that something is missing. Many people will know already the key facts of this story, and the film, in reality, does not reveal much more. It's not just the lightness of the science, nor the way in which his earlier public appearances do not appear to figure in the story, but even the main theme of the marriage feels incomplete. Perhaps it's because the screenplay is based largely on Jane Wilde Hawking's own book, and all the major players were alive when the film was produced.
Inevitable pressures in the relationship are hinted at, but what we see still seems rather sugar-coated. When Jane is challenged as to the fatherhood of their third child, we realise we've seen little of the intimacy of their marriage, but also we barely seem to have scratched the surface of Jane's other ambiguous relationship with choirmaster Jonathan Jones (played by Charlie Cox).
It's a shame, because no one's about to revisit this story since there's little chance they will be able to match Redmayne's central interpretation.
Still. The film is worth watching for its strong performances. 6/10.