Video: The Theory of Everything - Exclusive preview
IT IS 1963, and we're at a student party in Oxford. A young man approaches a young woman.
"I'm a cosmologist," he says.
"What's that?"
"It's religion for intelligent atheists."
You will have seen him on The Simpsons and Star Trek but you've never seen him like this. Stephen Hawking, the world's most famous living scientist, as a young, able-bodied, ambitious student, chatting someone up.
This is the beginning of The Theory of Everything, the story of Hawking's exceptional life framed by the blossoming – and eventual withering – of romance with his first wife, then Jane Wilde.
Straight away we are tipped off to the broad tone that the movie will take on their relationship: one of his godless cosmology, and of her more conventional Christianity. But how true to life is it? And if it isn't, how much does that matter?
Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are outstanding in the roles of Stephen and Jane. Redmayne especially is extraordinary in his portrayal of how Hawking is affected by motor neuron disease. By the end, when he is almost completely paralysed and unable to speak naturally, everything must be conveyed visually. Redmayne accomplishes this task brilliantly.
Jones plays the indomitable Jane with quiet restraint and subtlety. This is fitting since her performance, and the role Jane played in his life, are always at risk of being overlooked.
The film skimps on the science, but nit-picking over the accuracy of science in movies is rarely worthwhile. It's too much to hope that a biopic can convey the depth of what Hawking did. It's technical stuff, after all – and even Hawking's bestselling pop science book, A Brief History of Time, tops lists of books we don't finish.
But no one had used quantum physics to examine what happens in black holes before Hawking. He discovered that contrary to the belief that nothing can escape the gravity of black holes, a small amount of radiation can in fact get out.
In the movie, that discovery – of what would come to be known as Hawking radiation – is conveyed as a eureka moment that happens when Hawking is staring into a fire. The reality – the proof coming only after months of intense calculation – shows that this stuff is difficult, even for the world's smartest man.
The film's director, James Marsh, has experience in making films based on scientific experiments. His 2011 documentary film Project Nim was the story of a baby chimp reared as a human child; it was a compelling story of science, but science gone very wrong.
Despite the immense richness of the subject matter here, his telling of Hawking's work doesn't communicate the same complexity. The Theory of Everything splashes around on the shore, but doesn't go deep into what Hawking actually did.
In some ways, another new movie, Interstellar
So does Marsh succeed in telling the story of the central relationship in Hawking's life? To find out, we spoke exclusively to Jane Hawking, who was divorced from Stephen in 1995 and whose book, Travelling to Infinity: My life with Stephen was adapted by Anthony McCarten to form the core of the movie.
Stephen has said he found the film "broadly true". What do you think?
The parts of the film that were true to life were particularly moving, some of them quite overwhelming, but I did not relate to the fictitious episodes or anything outside my own experience.
How was that first meeting with Stephen?
There was no exchange about cosmology or religion, except that Stephen explained that he had just begun research in cosmology in Cambridge. Instead, he gave a lively account of his encounter with the Oxford examiners who called him for a viva after Finals.
There's a scene in the film about the May Ball, where Stephen explains that the men's shirts are fluorescing under UV light because of Tide washing powder. The next day, there's a packet of Tide on your doorstep. Did that happen?
It isn't really the sort of thing that anyone would make up!
Has your role as a conduit in explaining Stephen's work been overlooked?
Although a linguist, I was always interested in, and fascinated by, Stephen's explanations of his work, and proud of his discoveries and achievements. There was a time when I could explain gravitational collapse and subsequently black holes to an amateur audience, but only in practical not mathematical terms.
I did the first proofreading of A Brief History of Time, and when it came to writing my memoir, I consulted many scientific friends, so that contrary to what many critics supposed and were churlish enough to voice, I did actually write the scientific sections myself.
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