Film Review: Love's sweet science

The pre-Oscar hype told us that there were really only two actors with reasonable chances for winning this year.

They were both British, both playing gifted Cambridge graduates who made advances in their fields that had huge impacts on the development of the 20th century and, according to the gossip rags, they are really good friends off-screen.

We now know that Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of Stephen Hawking beat Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game but, in an ironic trivia twist, they have both played the world renowned physicist and author of A Brief History of Time.

Cumberbatch was the first person to play Hawking on screen in the 2004 television movie Hawking, which dealt with the period of his life as a doctoral student at Cambridge struggling to complete his research in the face of the onset of motor neuron disease that has afflicted him ever since.

The Theory of Everything, based on the memoir of his first wife Jane, begins in 1963 at Cambridge where the young genius is still physically capable but intellectually adrift as he struggles to decide what the focus of his research will be.

When he meets Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), the relationship eggs him on to find some direction and together they embark on what will become the defining period in both their lives as his ground-breaking work coincides with the arrival and rapid onset of his disease. Essentially Wilde's memoir is the story of how she gave up her own ambitions to look after her husband for 30 years, until he left her for his nurse, but the film tries hard not to blame either of them too much for the destruction of Camelot.

Documentary director James Marsh (who won an Oscar for Man on Wire in 2004) directs this all with suitable polish, but its restraint makes it difficult to remember much of it once it is finished. Its saviour is the strength of its lead performances and while Redmayne might have, in part, won the Oscar because we love true-life stories of triumph, there is an intelligence and impishness to his portrayal that makes his Hawking very hard to dislike.

This is more of a story about a marriage than physics and on that level the film is reasonably successful. If you want to know why Hawking is so revered as a scientist, you'll have to read A Brief History of Time.