The Theory of Everything

2014 - Dir: James Marsh - 2 hour 3 minutes
Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 22nd May, 2015

This is the story of Jane and Stephen Hawking - you’ll note that Jane is the first named in the catchline - and that’s quite deliberate. What this film represents is a triumph of Jane’s experience and persona after decades in which the family was viewed solely through the prism of Stephen’s genius, who as well as being the world’s best-known scientist is also the world’s best-known sufferer of motor neurone disease.
Stephen Hawking’s verdict on the movie was that it needed more science - but Jane said that it needed more emotion. Both however approved of the film. They met the actors - Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne - before the filming began and were both astounded by how closely they were able to represent the mannerisms, gestures and speech patterns of the young Hawkings. Jane said, “When I saw the film, I thought: she’s stolen my personality!”
The relative lack of science in the film isn’t so much down to the film makers not wishing to burden audiences with a weighty subject - more a desire to reflect Jane’s experience. “The truth was, there were four partners in our marriage,” says Jane. “Stephen and me, motor neurone disease and physics. If you took out motor neurone disease, you are still left with physics. Mrs Einstein, you know, cited physics as a difference for her divorce ...” During their marriage, she says, Stephen would retreat into himself. And, though he tried to explain physics to her, she always felt shut out of the world that was so crucial to him.  She also explains her reaction to the movie by saying “The important thing is that the feelings, where they are there, are very much true to our experiences. So from an emotional point of view, it’s spot on. The only thing is that they’ve had to minimise the strains and struggles, because in our real life the difficulties of dealing with Stephen’s disease were much greater than they appear in the film.” And, yes, the impression given in the film that she and Stephen managed to split up without too much acrimony – and that Jane’s new partner and now husband, musician Jonathan Hellyer Jones, became part of their immediate family – is indeed an accurate one.
The Theory of Everything, which was based on Jane’s memoir of their time together. Now 71, she and Jonathan divide their life between Cambridge (where Stephen lives nearby) and their house in northern France, and she makes regular visits to Seattle where her and Stephen’s eldest child, Robert, works for Microsoft and has a son and a daughter. Looking back she says “Being Stephen’s carer was such a struggle, and it’s a lonely job looking after a disabled person. Thinking back, I honestly wonder how I got through it. But what you hope is that the years since have brought improvements to the lives of disabled people and their carers, and I think for a while it was like that. But now the clock is turning back, and we can’t let that happen.”