A brief prologue at Buckingham Palace quickly dissolves, in rather on-the-nose fashion, from a slowly rolling wheelchair to a fast-spinning bicycle, as young Stephen (Redmayne) joyfully races a friend through the streets of Cambridge in 1963. A skinny, rumpled-looking fellow who peers out from behind perpetually dirty, thick-rimmed glasses, Stephen is a brilliant graduate student in cosmology, and already deeply fascinated by time, the origins of the universe and other theoretical concepts that will occupy much of his later writing and research. But even as his intellectual prowess knows no limits, his physical vigor soon abandons him, as foreshadowed early on when he idly knocks over a cup of tea. At around the half-hour mark his head hits the pavement with a sickening crack, at which point Stephen learns he has MND, a disease related to ALS that will gradually shut down all muscular control, and that he will live for only two years at most.
Unwilling to accept this grim diagnosis, however, is Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), whom Stephen immediately falls in love with and marries — never mind that, as a student of foreign languages and poetry as well as a devout member of the Church of England, she represents in many ways his intellectual and philosophical opposite. (Debating Jane on the existence of God, Stephen notes that he has “a slight problem with the whole celestial-dictator premise,” one of many wry witticisms that pepper Anthony McCarten’s literate script.) But their differing systems of belief (she has one, he doesn’t) turn out to be a unifying principle rather than a divisive one, and indeed, one of the film’s most bracing thematic motifs is Hawking’s refusal to lock himself into rigidly predetermined conclusions, his openness to reversing and contradicting his own monumental work in pursuit of ever higher and deeper forms of knowledge.
Jane is bravely determined to help her husband fight his debilitating illness and enjoy however many years they have together, which happily turn out to be far more than expected (Hawking is now 72). Yet Marsh takes pains to convey the heavy burden of Stephen’s physical decline in every grueling particular, and Redmayne’s performance nails all the outward manifestations without unnecessary exaggeration: the contorted wrist, the drooping head, the stooped posture, the inward-pointing toes, the reliance on crutches and wheelchair, and the increasingly unintelligible speech that ultimately led Hawking to use a speech-generating device. Redmayne palpably conveys the man’s frustration and humiliation at each fresh deprivation, from his inability to transfer food from plate to mouth to his difficulty holding and playing with his children (Stephen and Jane have three kids, the disease having mercifully not interfered with every key bodily function).
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