The Theory of Everything

U.S. President Barack Obama talks with Stephen Hawking in the White House before presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 12, 2009 

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING       B-                 

Great Britain  (123 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  James Marsh 

Biographical profiles (biopics) do not typically make for great cinema, even when well regarded by critics, as instead they tend to be showpieces for great acting performances, through some films can transcend the genre, where the performances anchor more complicated works like Scorsese’s RAGING BULL (1980), Michael Apted’s COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER (1980), Jim Sheridan’s MY LEFT FOOT (1989), Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), or James Mangold’s WALK THE LINE (2005).  This does not fall into that distinguished company, largely because the source material is Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen, the 2007 memoir by Stephen Hawking’s wife Jane, so the portrait isn’t so much about physics or the celebrated scientist, but instead describes what it was like to care for someone attempting to cope with such a grave disability.  However, due to the larger than life persona of Hawking, one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, where his lifelong quest, much like Einstein before him, has been to explain the meaning of the universe, his stature overshadows and literally dwarfs what this picture has to offer.  As an incomplete picture of Hawking himself, concentrating more on the long suffering wife, it’s all about the performances, with Eddie Redmayne, from Hick (2011), My Week with Marilyn (2011), and LES MISÉRABLES (2012) as Hawking, and Felicity Jones from Like Crazy (2011), as his wife Jane.  It’s the first major film where the young actors have been allowed starring roles, both literally carrying the picture with Oscar worthy performances.  Like Daniel Day-Lewis portraying an artist with cerebral palsy, learning to write and paint with his only controllable limb, his left foot, Redmayne is near miraculous in his stunning display of physicality, even as he spends half the film in a wheelchair, expressing the deteriorating effects of motor neuron disease, otherwise known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, where the average survival rate even today is only three or four years, as most die of respiratory failure.  When Hawking was diagnosed in 1963 at the age of 21, he was given 2 years to live, yet is miraculously still alive today, even posting about the film on social media, though he is almost entirely paralyzed and communicates through an electronic speech-generating device.

Stephen Hawking Tells Us What He Really Thinks Of 'The Theory of Everything'  Laura Rosenfeld from Tech Times, November 19, 2014: 

I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well in The Theory of Everything Movie. He spent time with ALS sufferers so he could be authentic. At times, I thought he was me.

Seeing the film has given me the opportunity to reflect on my life. Although I'm severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work. I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero gravity flight. One day I hope to go into space.

I've been privileged to gain some understanding of the way the universe operates through my work. But it would be an empty universe indeed without the people that I love.

Despite the brilliance of a continually disfigured Redmayne in a performance that reportedly made the celebrated scientist cry, though a showcase of the most heartbreaking moments of one’s life might have a tendency to do that, not to be overshadowed, Felicity Jones is a marvel of inner strength and determination herself, where her character knows what she’s getting into when she meets Hawking in 1963 and still chooses to marry him and take care of this man almost single handedly.  The film is as much about her selfless resolve and her devotion to duty in dealing with such a severe disability, where the film is more about their marriage than anything having to do with science.  While the audience sees early signs of brilliance from Hawking, there’s no reason to believe that Jane saw him as anything more than simply a man she fell in love with and married, where in the film she seems more concerned about his religious beliefs than his scientific accomplishments.  Adapted from the second memoir of Jane Hawking by Anthony McCarten, which is an abridged reworking of her original 1999 memoir, Music to Move the Stars:  A Life with Stephen, this is unfortunately the root of the film’s problems, as the perspective is simply too narrow and the focus too ordinary, turning this into a typical Hollywood tearjerker that magnifies the personal struggles at the expense of learning more about Hawking’s place in the scientific community.  When it was released the book was considered scandalous, as Hawking by that time was an avowed celebrity, worshipped throughout the entire world, where his success was considered a triumph over his disability, but until the publication and huge success of A Brief History of Time in 1988, selling more than 5 million copies, translated into 33 different languages, for the previous 25-years, Jane spent most of that time in the back-breaking labor of caring for an invalid husband while raising three children, described in her book as living under the “tyranny” of his disability (she nicknamed him “the puppeteer” and “the emperor”), as the Hawkings were financially strapped and dependent on others, including the MacArthur Foundation, for the exorbitant costs connected to his medical care.  During this time Jane received little support, encouragement, or recognition for the sacrifices she was making.  Her book was viewed in the media with skeptical negativity for bringing these dirty details into light, where her candor was not appreciated, but after 1989, his book and other projects brought in huge sums of money, which finally made Hawking a wealthy man and more than likely played a large role in the collapse of their marriage.   

Among the sources of conflict between them was religion, as Jane was a fervent believer while he was an atheist, his family (barely seen in the movie) was never fond of Jane and were reportedly never nice to her, and while she sacrificed to provide for his every need, he would isolate himself from his family where he could be devoted to physics.  The mounting pressures on Jane’s shoulders are the real focus of the film, where it was her mother’s advice to find an outlet of her own, suggesting she sing in the church choir, which brings her a certain amount of solace, where she meets Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox) as the choirmaster, who recently lost his wife to illness and develops a close relationship with Jane and the rest of the Hawking family in the 1980’s, helping provide a certain stability to an otherwise out of control situation.  Yet as Jane keeps having children, rumors persist, even within Jane’s own family, about who is the actual father, where it’s hard to believe it could be Stephen, yet surprisingly this function remains “automatic,” as he describes it, which is a bit amazing considering the extreme degree of his physical paralysis.  For decades, Hawking ignored his physical deterioration, exerting all his focus into his intellectual pursuits, where one of the psychological impacts of the disease is a detached overcompensation of the intellectual at the expense of that part of the brain that processes emotional development.  Marsh is a visually fluid director, where perhaps the most attractive cinematic techniques on display are the highly colorful video flashback sequences, which are like happy memories as seen through home movies.  By 1990, however, Stephen decides to leave Jane and live in America with his nurse, Elaine Mason (Mazine Peake), who was married at the time, but they later married, all but discontinuing contact with Jane.  Soon afterwards, the house and garden the family had shared in Cambridge were torn down, where according to Jane, “I felt it had all been taken away from me…I was absolutely committed to the marriage and would never have ended it.  When we first knew each other he was very funny and very engaging, and I had great faith.  I was so positive about Stephen fulfilling his genius.”  Ironically, left out of the film was Stephen’s eventual separation and divorce from Elaine as well in 2006, following which Hawking resumed closer relationships with Jane, his children, and grandchildren.  The film, based upon the revised memoir written in 2007, actually reflects their happier period together. 

While Hawking, through his study of black holes, is the first to bring together ideas of quantum mechanics and gravitation in an enlightening and consistently provocative manner, something that will be a matter of discussion for years to come, his disease-related physical deterioration continues to progress, and by 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of about one word per minute, and by 2009 he could no longer drive his electronic wheelchair, where the fear is he will fall into complete paralysis, or locked-in syndrome.  He has increased breathing difficulties, sometimes requiring a ventilator, and has been hospitalized several times.  For 90% of ALS patients, every second of every minute can be a living hell, where many die of respiratory failure or commit suicide by refusing to have a tracheotomy.  The film shows how family members can be tricked and/or persuaded to make the decision for the patient not to have a tracheotomy, often at the advice of medical professionals, though this treads on dangerous moral and ethical grounds, and may even be considered a crime.

Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse)

Isabelle Huppert (left), Kool Shen (center), and director Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (Abus de faiblesse)             C               
France  Germany  Belgium  (105 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Catherine Breillat 

I am the pariah of French cinema.  That can make things complicated for me:  it is never easy to drum up a budget or to find a distributor for my films in France.  Some people refuse even to read my scripts.  But it also makes me very happy because hatred is invigorating.  All true artists are hated.  Only conformists are ever adored.                        

—Catherine Breillat, "Catherine Breillat: 'All true artists are hated'", Benjamin Secher interview from The Telegraph, April 5, 2008

While in this film Breillat has eliminated the nudity and sex scenes that typify her earlier works, she continues to make exactly the same kind of film, featuring loathsome, nearly unwatchable characters who are masochistic victims of their own narcissistic empty headedness, gluttons for punishment so to speak.  What these films have to say about society at large is a major question, as there’s a decided disconnect between Breillat characters and real life, where the all-consuming, self-centered nature of the people populating her films, ruled as they are by their nagging obsessions, does not say much for the world at large, where they seem to exist in a vacuum.  The exaggerated human tendencies on display aren’t entirely implausible, as some people are capable of just about anything, but it’s entirely possible Breillat has never once created an onscreen character that viewers can actually identify with.  Instead the intent of her films seems to be provocative in nature, where the pervasive themes of sadomasochism, bourgeois emptiness and discontent, and sexual obsession seem to be goading the audience into unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable territory, where it often feels exploitive, as if placed on the screen for shock value.  With only one film in her entire body of work worth recommending, 36 FILLETTE (1988), an intelligent and somewhat autobiographical exposé of budding sexuality seen through the eyes of a young 14-year old female girl, many of the rest are major disappointments.  Breillat began her career as a novelist, published while still a 17-year old teenager, where success came early from writing a “dirty” novel, L 'homme facile (A Man for the Asking), the subject of some controversy in France where the female protagonist prefers rape to consensual sex, so the book was classified only for readership older than age 18.  This scandalous introduction along with the frank nudity and unsimulated sex scenes in her films led to her being labeled a “porno auteriste.”  At age 24 she played a role in Bertolucci’s THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972), wrote a few sexploitation films for others, while making her own first film in her late 20’s, A REAL YOUNG GIRL (1976), which was only released 23-years afterwards due to the explicitness of the material, where it’s rare to see sexuality presented in such an unconventional and clinically bleak manner, where her later films continue to express graphic sexual depictions, including the use of a male porn star (Rocco Siffredi) to provide an erection in ROMANCE (1999) and ANATOMY OF HELL (2004).     

In late 2004 at the age of 56, Breillat suffered a stroke and was hospitalized for five months with paralysis on the left side of her body.  After learning to walk again, she completed the pre-production work of UNE VIEILLE MAÎTRESSE (THE LAST MISTRESS, 2007), a controversial 19th century costume drama starring Asia Argento that was the only film made at that point in her career adapted from someone else’s material.  Her next project was to be an adaptation of her own novel, Bad Love, starring Naomi Campbell and Christophe Rocancourt, a notorious criminal who had already served five years in an American prison for defrauding multiple victims out of millions of dollars.  Known for working with non-professionals, Breillat’s initial recollections of Rocancourt, “He is so intelligent, so sincere, so arrogant.  You have to be arrogant to achieve anything in this life.  When I first saw him, I knew he would be perfect for my film.”  Over the course of the next several months, however, Rocancourt initially borrowed small sums of money from Breillat before swindling her out of more than 700,000 euros, for which he was convicted in 2012 and the planned film never made, a harrowing ordeal that she describes in her book, Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse), which was turned into this film, starring Isabelle Huppert as Maud, a stand-in for the filmmaker.  After suffering a stroke, where the director makes an uncredited appearance as an anonymous patient walking in the hospital corridor with a cane, Maud happens to see a television interview with con man Vilko Piran (French rapper Kool Shen), recently released from prison after serving his 12-year sentence for defrauding millions from unsuspecting victims, where she is utterly fascinated by his sexual swagger and total lack of remorse for his crimes, wanting him to star in her next movie.  When they meet, he’s instantly interested, but will only agree if the film shows him in a positive light, appearing to be smarter than he is, creating some mythical aura surrounding his criminal activities.  Due to her medical limitations, Maud needs help with many of her daily activities, where she remains partially paralyzed, yet in typical Breillat fashion, she exaggerates the grotesque through a continuing series of exhaustingly repetitive menial tasks, replicating the difficulties of recovering after a stroke, filled with a heightened state of frustration and personal insecurity.  Maud has a way of teasing Vilko’s masculinity, suggesting he is strong and able bodied, but belittles his poor lower class instincts and lack of education, where he is seemingly a terrible businessman, as he’s constantly owing money to people.  Initially she’s more than happy to help out by writing him a check for a loan, and he’s more than happy to take her money.

Over time, this process of writing checks becomes habit forming, where the amusing joking and teasing that defined their initial relationship becomes more disturbingly depressing, where they are more of a constant and nagging presence in each other’s lives, endlessly complaining about petty concerns, expressed through incessant cellphone calls that she receives from him as she lies in bed, constantly searching through the covers for her phone, where the repeated images of Maud lying asleep in bed begins to resemble that of a human corpse.  Vilko, on the other hand, is more of a thug, where he’s a shady character always looking for a big score, but he’s attracted to the aristocratic way of life that Maud leads, where she protects herself with wealth and status and is indifferent to the lives of others, barely even retaining any connection with her own family, so is it any wonder that he wants a piece of what she’s got?  While she initially has the upper hand, the roles reverse in the second half where the two of them are constantly playing power games, each trying to outdo the other in showing less concern, where writing checks is a way to express that she “doesn’t” care, that she’s not the least bit concerned, not allowing the physical struggles or hardships to phase her one bit.  It’s all an act they play, surrounded by walls of indifference, where there’s no sexual connection, only obligatory behavior, yet there’s an undercurrent of need that grows more desperate over time, where they each seem to thrive on the attention of the other.  Vilko recognizes that Maud treats men like slaves, where she enjoys humiliating her assistant by forcing him to fold her underwear, proudly wearing a veneer of independence, while she obviously enjoys being surrounded by the intoxication of his rugged masculinity, like having a male porn star around the house, recalling Huppert’s performance in Maurice Pialat’s LOULOU (1980), where she similarly abandons her bourgeois friends for the crudeness of an unemployed layabout.  Vilko, however, is able to take advantage of her pride and this false veneer of independence by playing upon her vanity, continually offering the impression that his own life is in shambles, that he’ll be destitute without another check, even as he lives in a five-star hotel that wraps the food service meals neatly in a box while tied in a bow, while also drinking vintage 2003 Chateau Margaux wine that currently retails for an average price of $931 a bottle, obviously charging a huge mark-up price when ordered at a hotel restaurant.  So while these two plead poverty, who are they fooling? — as they both continue to lead lavish lives surrounded by only the best that money can buy.  The absurdity of it all feels exaggerated and distorted to the point of being humorous, though not many would find this a human comedy, where the film plays upon a perceived human weakness, but it’s nothing either one of these characters would admit to, as they both get exactly what they ask for.