The Theory Of Everything

When a young Hawking - played, in a piece of mimicry alive with verve and conviction, by Eddie Redmayne - announces in the opening of James Marsh’s The Theory Of Everything that Cosmology is “a religion for intelligent atheists”, the film plays into that great cliché of depicting science on screen: that it must either be a rebuke of religion, or a valentine to it.

This is embodied in the film’s twin star-cross’d lovers: Redmayne, a man of science, falling for Felicity Jones, as Jane Wilde, a girl of God. When they gaze at the heavens, he sees equations, she quotes Genesis. They’re the original odd couple! Marsh’s grand closing reel finale attempts to convince you that this love-story is on the same plane as cosmology; that, in that instant of boy meets girl, a big bang occurs, spawning love and life (they’d have three children), causing a ripple of infinitesimal possibilities.

It’s a romantic finalé to a film that’s, in its preceding decades, determinedly domestic. Adapted from Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, Anthony McCarten’s script chronicles marital struggles and Dr Hawking’s debilitating affliction with motor neuron disease; and does so less with Inspirational overtones, and in a far more quotidian fashion. Were this to stand in stark contrast to the wild ideas and far-reaching dreams of theoretical physics, there might be something here. Instead there’s not so much.