Toronto Film Festival: The Theory of Everything - film review: 'Eddie Redmayne astonishing as Stephen Hawking'

Wonderful performances from stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones help this Stephen Hawking tale triumph
Deeply affecting: Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones who plays his wife Jane
David Sexton28 October 2014

Compared to car chases and shoot-outs, thinking has little to offer the cinema. It’s difficult to make pure intelligence convincing, let alone dramatic.

For obvious reasons, Stephen Hawking’s life makes a pretty good test case — a challenge this new biopic from Working Title, directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire, Project Nim, Shadow Dancer), meets triumphantly.

At 21, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and told he had a life expectancy of only two years. He is now 72 and his life has been richly fulfilled, despite severe disability. For 30 years, he was married to Jane Wilde, on whose memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, this movie is based; then, for 10 years, to Elaine Mason, one of his nurses (played pretty broadly here by Maxine Peake) before that marriage too ended in divorce.

Marsh has given this story a wholly conventional treatment, taking us from Hawking’s first meeting with Jane at a Cambridge student party to the end of their marriage with his departure to receive an honour in America in the care of her rival Elaine.

While Hawking’s illness worsens with frightening rapidity, his achievements in theoretical physics — here no more than broadly signalled — progress with incredible speed too.

The staging and filming is consistently good, despite often resorting to montage sequences to show family happiness and the passing of time. But what makes The Theory of Everything so deeply affecting is the two wonderful performances by its leads.

As Jane, Felicity Jones is deeply touching from start to finish. She’s just so emotionally present, so involving, all the time she’s on the screen. She makes this film just as much about Jane as it is about Stephen Hawking.

And as her husband Eddie Redmayne is astonishing, a persuasive lookalike as a young man and then portraying disability wholly convincingly too. Almost preposterously good-looking, he makes Hawking effortlessly attractive, now floppy, now incisive, always charming. You credit the intelligence.

Together they make the movie much more vital than could have been anticipated. There will be prizes. They will be deserved.

Latest Toronto Film Festival reviews

1/18

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in