A recent Oxford graduate, young Stephen Hawking amazes the world’s distinguished professors with the depth of his knowledge and his ability to think outside the box, and the young man has a great future ahead of him. All his enthusiasm and energy Hawking is going to put to create a Theory of Everything – the final mathematical model that could explain the universe and bring together all previous discoveries of mankind. Alas, fate decides otherwise, already in his twenties Stephen is mowed down by a severe disease that leads his body to paralysis. Doctors are powerless to affect the state of a talented scientist who soon lost the ability to move independently, to write and even speak – to admit defeat in the fight against this cruel manifestation of nature do not allow only two reasons: the desired theory and a beloved woman who shouldered their fragile shoulders the difficult task of nursing a genius.
Screenwriter Anthony McCarten began working on the screenplay as soon as he read Jane Wilde’s memoirs, and already in the process of creating the script the producers of the future film began trying to get approval from Hawking and his ex-wife
As blasphemous as it may sound, but the biography of Stephen Hawking really asks to the screen. Bright scientist, brilliant popularizer of science among teenagers and young scientists, a fearless fighter with a serious illness, a true superstar of science – such people really should become an example for the younger generation. Luckily, Hawking refuted all predictions of doctors still continues to work actively, and even manages to joke about what a keen interest to him the cinema suddenly showed (in 2004, in television show he was played, remember, by Benedict Cumberbatch, and this is not the only appearance of Hawking on the screen). In general, the scientist was sympathetic to what turned out to be directed by James Marsh. It is not easy to oppose the opinion of the luminary of science, but we have a claim to the film.
The primary reason for some of our dissatisfaction is the choice of director for such an unusual project. Marsh is a well deserved person, but much more drawn to documentary films and succeeded in it. It might seem that documentary and biographical filmmaking are somewhere in the same dimension, but this is an illusion. Not only does a biopic need to “animate” its protagonist, a biography, oddly enough, needs a plot, otherwise it turns into a banal enumeration of facts.
It is possible to find a lot of reasons to justify such a scenario move, and not the last one is that the movie is based on Hawking’s wife Jane’s book of memories, that is why we watch the events in Stephen’s life in a detached way, sometimes not going too deep into his relations going out of the house.
