British science is having a cinematic moment, with The Theory of Everything now and The Imitation Game soon. Yet neither film has much science in it. These accounts of Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing, respectively, are engaging and well-crafted but modeled all too faithfully on old-school romantic dramas.
In the movie universe, scientific breakthroughs — even when they help defeat the Nazis, as Turing’s did — must be less important than love. Which, come to think of it, is also the corn-belt communique beamed back from Interstellar, a film that relies on the cosmological savvy of Kip Thorne, one of Hawking’s closest colleagues.
Thorne appears briefly in The Theory of Everything, which introduces several of Hawking’s scientific peers but focuses on a single companion: the one who wrote the book from which co-producer Anthony McCarten’s script is derived.
She’s Jane Hawking, nee Wilde, as embodied by the ideally named Felicity Jones. Pretty and vivacious, yet not so delicate as she appears, Jane is irresistible to the young Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) when he spots her at a party. This is one of many incidents depicted in the film that didn’t exactly happen. Every time an everyday event can be transformed into a movie moment, McCarten and director James Marsh (Man on Wire) go for it.