Behind every great man (mind) is an even greater woman (heart)

Rating: 9/10 (6 December 2014)

Not one to seek out romance, but a good one is so romantic :-) Early in The Theory of Everything, the student Stephen Hawking strides across the grounds at Cambridge University in the 1960s, his face dreamy. He is lost in thought about the nature of time. A pivotal incident early in the film triggers the battery of tests and the prediction that he had only two years to live.The rest of the film follows that grim forecast. It dramatizes how he achieved renown within physics because of his ground-breaking 1970s work on black holes. As he's grown older, Hawking has become progressively weaker as his condition wasted his muscles, but his brilliant mind continued to whir. In the process, a dominant myth took shape around him, a myth that presented to wider society a misleading view of the physicist and his research. The myth was best articulated by Hélène Mialet in her book Hawking Incorporated. She noted that the cosmologist is overwhelmingly presented in popular culture as an intellect "liberated from his body and seemingly emancipated from everything that clutters the mundane mind (such as emotions, values, and prejudices)." But his film debunks this myth. By showing Hawking cracking his head on the concrete, it inverts the central idea of the myth: Hawking's mind is not free of his body, but is instead bound inextricably to it. Moreover, the film makes Hawking's support systems visible and vivid. His wife Jane Hawking dresses him, feeds him and cares for him. She and, later, nurse Elaine Mason teach him to communicate after a tracheotomy takes away his ability to speak. A system of technology then grants him a new, robotic voice. With these systems, his science has flourished. Anyway without revealing anymore, my only disappointment was the lack of a little more exposition of Hawking's inventive mind