'Theory of Everything': Love, a failing body, a soaring mind

Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and best-selling author, is 72 now. In 1963, when he was 21, a brash, bright-eyed Cambridge doctoral student, he began to lose control of his muscles. Simple things like picking up a pencil or climbing the stairs became daunting. He was told he had "motor neuron disease," amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. Doctors gave him two years to live. Nobody was doing a bucket challenge.

The Theory of Everything is director James Marsh's very fine, very moving account of that time - and the relationship that started just before his diagnosis, and turned into a 30-year marriage, with Jane Wilde, also a Cambridge student. On that level, the film is a love story - full of impossible courage, compassion, and conflict.

Eddie Redmayne, who scampered like a pup around Michelle Williams' Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, stars as Hawking, capturing not just the piercing physicality of a body in decay, but also the resolve and curiosity of a spirit, an intellect, as agile as ever. Felicity Jones, who played the young mistress to Ralph Fiennes' Charles Dickens in The Invisible Woman, is Jane - dazzled by Stephen's brilliance and humor, but hardly intimidated. She may not grasp this space-time singularity business, but she understands him, loves him, then bears his children - and bears the increasing burden of living with a partner whose body is folding in on itself.

But The Theory of Everything, based on Wilde's memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen, operates on multiple planes. There is more going on here than a love story that ultimately finds both Stephen and Jane turning to other partners: a widowed church choirmaster for Jane, a saucy nurse for Stephen (Charlie Cox and Maxine Peake, respectively).

Like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, a Denny's Grand Slam breakfast of a movie (nothing in moderation), The Theory of Everything lobs hefty concepts into the air. Can science explain our existence? Is there something beyond this three-dimensional physical universe? Is there, gulp, a God?

Interestingly, Nolan glommed a lot of his black hole and quantum mechanics fundamentals from Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology - one of Hawking's oldest, closest colleagues. The scale and scope of the two movies are vastly dissimilar - one set in an apocalyptic near-future, the other in a cozy England of garden croquet, elderflower wine, and funny little cars.

Redmayne should be getting a lot of notice for his performance; it's palpable, it's poignant. Jones, too, is terrific. And Marsh, who won the documentary Academy Award for his Philippe Petit Twin Towers caper Man on Wire, brings a keen artistry to The Theory of Everything: The rooms Hawking finds himself in begin to narrow as his muscles weaken, the world surrounding him gets wider, further from his reach. Marsh contrasts the early, exuberant scenes of coxing on the Cam, of pedaling bicycles through the university town, with whirring time-lapse sequences, with the past and present merging, memory and reality blurring.

Another film, Julian Schnabel's 2008 multiple Oscar nominee The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, shares a connection with The Theory of Everything. It, too, is about a man whose body has ceased to function. But it, too, is about a man whose mind is functioning faster, and with more imagination, than ever.

The life of the mind, indeed.

Directed by James Marsh. With Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, Maxine Peake, David Thewlis. Distributed by Focus Features. Running time: 2 hours, 3 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (adult themes).

Playing at: Ritz Five (opening in more area theaters Nov. 21). EndText

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