4 stars (out of 5)
Stephen Hawking has been portrayed in films before (including by Benedict Cumberbatch in the fine BBC TV movie Hawking in 2004), and yet it took James Marsh, acclaimed director of dramas (The King, Shadow Dancer) and documentaries (Man On Wire, Project Nim), to properly tackle his story for the bigscreen – and even, perhaps, try and get a handle on the real science that underpins Hawking’s most mind-bending ideas. Well, nearly.
Opening in the early ‘60s, with Stephen (Eddie Redmayne in his Golden Globe-winning performance) a promising student at Cambridge and an amiable mixture of brilliance, cockiness, shyness and goofiness, we watch as he meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a party and quickly falls for her. They begin a happy, even joyful relationship, and yet when the persistent and worrying health problems Stephen’s suffering worsen, and he’s diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two years to live, he attempts to break away and spare her (one of the great scenes here has his Dad Frank, nicely played by Simon McBurney, warning Jane of the doomed battle to come and excusing her for inevitably wanting to escape). However, the undaunted Jane refuses to leave and also doesn’t believe in Stephen’s expiry date, and Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarten (working from Jane’s autobiography) then depict the Hawkings’ lives from thereon, and how they married and fought the deteriorating illness as Stephen became a Dad, an esteemed professor and something of an international celebrity after penning A Brief History Of Time. And just kept on surviving.
Described by the real Hawking as “broadly true” (he lent his ‘voice’ to some of the later scenes and a few props too), this strongly executed biopic boggles the brain slightly when it gets into the business of black holes and the origins of the universe, yet also proves moving and at times emotionally raw. It also rather daringly demonstrates that the older Hawking, no matter how severely incapacitated he might have been, was capable of behaving badly, manipulating those closest to him and even fooling around a bit (well, sort of), and therefore, thankfully, isn’t quite the saint – or martyr – you might be expecting.
I Wake Up Screening 