Sometimes you don’t really fancy a film, but go and see it
anyway and then regret it. This weeks Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film
Club screening was one of these films. But thankfully I did not regret it, in
fact it turned out a lot better than I had expected!
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| Pre diagnoses at Cambridge. |
Superbly introduced by Rachel Findlay The Theory of Everything
(2014) played to a packed house and was very well received by an attentive
audience. Rachel gave us a few pointers and some background to the making of
this rather unusual love story, although we all knew the story of Stephan
Hawking and how he suffers from a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis better known as motor neurone disease that has gradually
paralysed him over the decades since he was given 2 to 3 years to live in 1963
when it was first diagnosed and, as we are all aware from his recent appearance
at the BAFTA’s where the movie won three awards[1] he
is currently in his seventies.
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| Jane and Stephan get married in 1965. |
This rather moving and emotional film deals with his life through
his first wife Jane Wilde (played in what should have been a award winning role
by Felicity Jones) who he was married to for thirty years and who gave him three
children. The period takes us from the time they first met at Cambridge in 1963
until basically their divorce and his subsequent marriage to Elaine Mason
(Maxine Peake). Its based on Jane’s revised memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephan Hawking. Strangely despite Hawking debilitating
disease Eddie Redmayne’s award winning success never lets this character get
angry and you also suspect from his remarkable portrayal that Hawking never
quite realised the affect that it was having on his nearest and dearest.
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| Now unable to speak Jane experiments with alternate methods. |
Director James March, who you may now from Man on Wire (2008) a documentary film
that chronicled French man Philippe Petit’s high wire walk between the Twin
Towers of New Yorks Worlds Trade Centre in 1974 or the IRA drama Shadow
Dancer in 2011, has made a genuine attempt to show the realities that
faced Jane during her thirty year marriage to someone that was unable to do
anything for himself for most of the time and the strain of this becomes
gradually etched on the face of the actress. Rachel informed us that Redmayne
took six months to prepare for the role and the choreographer Alex Reynolds was
employed to help develop his uncanny performance. It was made difficult because
the star was expected to do as many as three different timespans in just one days
shooting.
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| The beginning of the end of the thirty year marriage. |
This is a good-looking film with an obvious attention to
detail with Eddie Redmayne actually meeting Hawking midway through the filming who
agreed to the use of the actual voice simulator that he used. As I said at the
beginning of this ramble sometimes you have got to take a leap of faith and see
a movie that your not sure of, sometimes your lucky as in this case, and
sometimes your not.
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| Professor Stephan Hawking. |
