Tropic Sprockets
The Theory of Everything
Physicist Stephen Hawking is very much a popular and a pop art figure, deep within our consciousness. He has been on countless documentaries. He was a character on The Simpsons and he has appeared on recent Star Trek TV episodes.
Much like Carl Sagan or Albert Einstein, Hawking has put a friendly and approachable face upon what is often dense, technical and hard to grasp: The subject of quantum mechanics. Now, in “The Theory of Everything” by James Marsh (Man on Wire) we have a film that attests to the physicist’s celebrity in our mind’s eye, our curiosity and our hearts.
Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a PhD student at Cambridge. He is quiet but not reserved. Hawking rides his bike with a manic intensity. He swills beer, plays pinball and has a cat-like ability to step on a chessboard and not disturb the pieces.
From the very first, his days are filled with locomotion. At a party he meets the debutante Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) a literature student, and a connection is made even though Jane is a Roman Catholic and Stephen is an atheist. One day, Hawking is jogging to his studies. He slips and tumbles to the hard, unforgiving pavement. His large black glasses crack like the windshield of a fighter plane. They tell him he has a motor-neuron disease, ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) with two years to live. He calculates forward, on and on.
The narrative is touching in its own right, but where the film really soars is in its cinematography by Benoit Delhomme which puts Redmayne’s Hawking into a painterly post-impressionist landscape as colorfully eccentric as anything by Van Gogh or Toulouse Lautrec where fireworks spin like pinwheels and satin gloves vibrate and throb into blue stars.
In its golden Easter tones, there is also something of Maxfield Parrish here or perhaps even Peter Pan of a sort. Of a man who in many ways was forced to transcend the natural earth of things to trace the start of time. The film does well also in showing Hawking the man, very driven and somewhat underhanded, secretive and disloyal in his personal life.
As his marriage breaks in Jane’s flirtation with Hawking’s new aide Jonathan (Charlie Cox), a new assistant Elaine (Maxine Peake) comes on the scene. With the publication of Hawking’s book it appears that the couple has patched things up. Alas, a button is pressed on Hawking’s synthesizer which voices: I invited Elaine to come with me to America.
At the film’s beginning, both he and Jane make cosmological valentines. Then comes resentment, a pregnancy with paternity in question accompanied by a gradual shoving off of intimacy, but never disrespect. The film clearly reveals the libidinous imp behind Hawking’s winning smile. Through it all, he races on, in great muscular tension with purgatorial pulling and snapping, within a chair and without, while he strives to find an equation to explain not only the beginning of atoms, but the moment when they also may cease to be.
Even when his relationships implode, Hawking becomes a 20th century Blake’s compass encircling our universe.
With “The Theory of Everything,” James Marsh does as well with the somewhat quirky Hawking as he did with the French daredevil Philippe Petit. Here, Stephen Hawking is a very human and very witty man, just as romantic, calculating, nervy and underhanded as he is iconic and myth-making.
Rosewater
The daring news pioneer Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, gives his directorial debut with the story of Maziar Bahari, a journalist from Canada and Iran who appeared on Stewart’s show as a joke. Interviewed by funnyman Jason Jones, Bahari was actually accused of being a spy. He was imprisoned by the Iranian government and placed in solitary for 118 days. While the direction is fluid and earnest with color and heart, the restrained tone gives it a somewhat tepid feel in the mode of an hour-long documentary.
Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal) is based in London. Upon awaking, he receives a tip from his friend, Hamid (Arian Moayed), to cover the 2009 election in Iran. Bahari speaks to progressive Mousavi supporters while also posing questions to the iron clad Ahmadinejad campaign. Along the way he agrees to be mock interviewed by Jason Jones who asks his opinions of his country as a spy for the CIA.
The next morning he is apprehended, blindfolded and taken to prison in front of his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Bahari is tortured.
Understandably he is terrified, in a Kafkaesque circumstance with no comprehension of what happened. Most of the action takes place in a small bare cell and this is where the action stalls a bit with much of the episodes seeming unduly repetitive and slow in motion almost to the point of visual haiku.
True to subject it may be, but as cinema experience, it makes for sleepy viewing. Despite some soporific side effects, there is slickness to be found within the first time director’s camera. As Bahari moves through downtown London images of his life pulse and slide about across the sides of buildings in the manner of Blade Runner or the sly poignance found in the work of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazi.”
Another highlight is the acting of Kim Bodnia as Bahari’s ruthless interrogator. For the most part though, the action follows convention with Bahari held in confinement to absolute silence as he cries out with little visual relief.
There is, however, one beautiful and crazy scene where Garcia Bernal dances in solitary to Leonard Cohen that almost makes the film. One hungers for more such verve.
Stewart’s first film is an effective account of the human spirit and it is certainly worthwhile, especially if you know little of Iran’s tumultuous election. As an engrossing film, however, “Rosewater” feels half hearted and sketchy, having the feel of an effort, rather than a deep exploration.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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