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Stephen Hawking is the most famous living physicist, if not the most famous living scientist, in the world. Hawking is best known for being debilitated by a motor neuron disease; he is almost completely paralyzed and communicates only through an electronic voice box. His first wife, Jane, wrote a memoir about their marriage, which has been turned into the Oscar-baiting The Theory of Everything. Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking, and he is believable, charismatic, funny and moving. Felicity Jones is Jane, who cared for Hawking through the beginnings of his disease and then for 30 more years, while also raising their three children; Jones is spectacularly sympathetic and heroic as a long-suffering, deeply moral, brilliant-in-her-own-right wife. But aside from this wonderful acting, The Theory of Everything is a clichéd disease-of-the-week, triumph-over-adversity movie. With all of the wondrous things Hawking thought and theorized, I was simply astonished by how little of it was used either thematically or dramatically. According to the film, Hawking’s great achievement seems to have been talking with a computer. This seems a bit offensive.
