No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet. Or, presumably, to his Significant Other. The lives of great men are occasionally diminished somewhat by their idiosyncrasies and their all-too-human frailties. And arguably, no one gets to see that flawed side of their genius more up-close than their intimate partners. And, yet, as far as our civilisation is concerned, we seem unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the shades of grey that go to define some of humanity’s keenest minds. The tendency to treat our revered icons with kid gloves is a widespread failing.
This endearing biopic, which traces the life of one of the most brilliant scientists ever — theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking — is a case in point. The story of Hawking’s evolution from a prodigious science graduate at Cambridge, through a debilitating and degenerative motor neuron disease (with just two years to live), the struggle of everyday living, to his path-breaking contributions to humanity’s understanding of the universe, is a dramatic tale of the triumph of the human spirit against adversity.
And, yet, the celebrated scientist was also fraught with limitations of personality, which no one felt more forcefully than Jane, Hawking’s wife of 30 years whom he divorced to marry his nurse. A strong-willed woman who marries her college-mate Stephen even after learning of his potentially fatal condition, Jane spends years as his consort battleship, travelling with him, tending him and nursing him (and their three children) — putting her own academic interest on hold. The superhuman, self-effacing effort drove her to the edge of depression.
In a searing memoir, published in 1999 after their divorce, Jane recalled that she felt “restrained only by the thought of my children from throwing myself in to the river, drowning in a slough of despond.”
Of Stephen himself, her descriptions are far from flattering: she called him “a masterly puppeteer” and an “all-powerful emperor”. Her role in the last years of their marriage consisted of telling the notoriously atheistic Hawking “that he was not God,” she noted.
For her brutally honest portrayal of their marriage, Jane was pilloried; chastened, she offered a revised, somewhat more forgiving account, in a subsequent memoir, on which this biopic is based.
So, The Theory of Everything is somewhat soft around the edges. It does a great job of encapsulating Hawking’s brilliance (and his wit) and offers a Dummy’s Guide to Cosmology. And given Eddie Redmayne’s masterly portrayal of Hawking (for which he has secured an Oscar nomination), we get a deeply empathetic account of Stephen’s struggle.
But the film sidesteps much of the dark sides of the marriage that Jane noted in her first memoir (and to that extent is somewhat unauthentic). But perhaps it didn’t need to, since Time — which is Stephen Hawking’s magnificent obsession — appears to have been a great healer.
