Hawking biopics
Oct. 23rd, 2020 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI have watched both Stephen Hawking biopics so you don’t have to.
(I should say I know next to nothing about Hawking’s actual life, so I can only rate for accuracy where I’ve seen press coverage about it.)
Theory of Everything
This is the big Oscar-bait Eddie Redmayne biopic from a few years ago. It sucks. Don’t watch it.
It is based on Jane Hawking’s memoir (Stephen Hawking’s first wife of 30 years, and mother of his three children) and apparently bears ZERO resemblance to any reality of their marriage. So much so that Jane hates it. So that says a lot.
This movie foregrounds Hawking’s illness. It is all about his illness and his noble, good humored, saintly suffering, and Jane’s inability to deal with that. It shows her as being unhappy immediately upon marrying him. And basically implies that Stephen was kind of okay with opening the marriage and letting her have an affair if it would make her happier? Apparently, according to the memoir, Stephen Hawking is not a perfect saint all the time and can be a right bastard, you know, like actual real people. The movie shows them breaking up in a sweet tear soaked scene where they both acknowledge that it’s time to end it. Apparently the actual break up was protracted and awful and involved screaming fights, cause you can still have those with someone with ALS.
The movie also able-body-gazes his disability in a really creepy way? Like shortly after his diagnosis, there’s a scene where Jane just stares at him trying to play croquet and silently cries at his limp and his gnarled hands and his lack of coordination. It is all about the other’s gaze of his disability and her pity for him. It’s gross.
If you think I might be exaggerating that reading of the text, the climax of the film is Stephen Hawking giving a talk, and the movie slowing down time as Eddie Redmayne stands up out of the chair and straightens out all his awkward posturing and walks to hand someone a pen. I guess it’s supposed to be his fantasy? But it basically just says, “We hired an able-bodied actor to play the most famous disabled person on the planet and we’re now going to prove just how much he’s physically transformed himself for the part OSCAROSCAROSCAR.”
Don’t watch this movie.
Hawking
This is a 2004 BBC made-for-TV movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch that I likely wouldn’t know existed if the hype machine for Theory of Everything didn’t dredge up press coverage of this as well.
This is…surprisingly decent? I mean, it’s made-for-TV, and looks it. They shot most of it handheld for god knows what reason. (It may have been 2004, but this isn’t a Bourne film. I don’t need shaky cam of people in lecture halls.)
But, unlike Theory of Everything, this one is not *just* about Hawking’s disability. It focuses on his time at Cambridge, from his diagnosis to his PhD. This means that Cumberbatch is affecting some physical impairments and a speech impediment by the end of the film, but it’s not the extreme give-me-an-Oscar transformation of Theory of Everything.
This also is very subtle, surprisingly—Hawking is a person whose life evokes bad literary metaphor: He writes about TIME because he thought he HAD SO LITTLE OF IT. He is TRAPPED IN HIS BODY but his mind is as big as the UNIVERSE. Theory of Everything trades in that. Hawking doesn’t.
Things I liked about Hawking:
- The way the disability was framed by the film. Hawking shows Stephen Hawking struggling with his progressive disability, but its focus is tightly on Hawking himself. It shows him letting a bath overrun the tub because he can’t turn off the taps. It shows him trying to tell a cabbie he wants to go to Trinity College when there’s a lot of street noise and the cabbie can’t understand him through his slurred speech—and then asks him to write it down, which he can’t do. It shows him having to fight for accessible housing when the school tries to put his room up a flight of stairs he would not be able to ascend. All these things are about Hawking struggling to navigate the world, and a fair number about how ablist the world is. They are not about gazing on his disability with pity.
It also treats his disability as matter of fact. There’s a scene where he falls down the stairs of a theatre balcony, but then it cuts to him watching the play. No slow mo, no drama around it. Just—this is what his life is like. I don’t know what the progression of his illness actually was, but this portrayal rang more true to me.
- The main tension of this movie was between Hawking’s initial prognosis—they gave him two years to live—and his desire to make his mark as a scientist. There is a heartbreaking scene where his father visits his PhD advisor and asks him to give Stephen an easy problem so that he can finish his PhD before he dies. (This just breaks me—to have all your dreams for your child winnow down to just wanting them to be able to finish their degree before they die.) The advisor says he can’t do that.
There’s a scene where Hawking tries to make his mark by publicly telling a tenured professor he’s wrong during a lecture the professor is giving—and it’s framed as something he’s doing because he thinks he doesn’t have time to be remembered for his own work.
It makes clear that he starts using topology because it’s *faster* than mathematics, and he needs to get his ideas out *fast.* We in the audience know he lived a long time and accomplished many things, but the entire movie is focused on what it would be like to have a once-in-a-generation brain and not enough time to use it.
- I loved the way this movie portrayed science. A lot of the movie was about the science. (Theory of Everything, the science was barely mentioned.) It shows how collaborative science is—you see that the Big Bang theory already existed, that theories about black holes already existed, and you see Hawking working with multiple mentor figures. It makes no attempt to claim him as alone in his discoveries, but in building on a wealth of ideas already bouncing around.
When Stephen finishes his PhD, the advisor visits the parents to tell them about it. The father asks what his son has done, and the only way the advisor can explain it is to say, “He made Einstein beautiful.”
The movie has a framing device of showing two scientists being interviewed before receiving their Nobel Prize at some point in the future of the time frame of the movie. I was very confused by this—like, should I know who these people are? Why are they here? But the movie brings it together brilliantly:
When Hawking has defended his thesis, the professor he had shouted down before tells him he’s full of crap—if there were a Big Bang, there would be some evidence of it. Where’s the radiation, Stephen? Someone would have noticed. So where is it, huh?
Then you cut back to the Nobel winners and realize—they’re winning the Nobel Prize for the discovery of cosmic background radiation. This so beautifully shows how Hawking is part of a web of scientists; he theorized it, others proved it. It’s elegant.
So, yeah. What I’m saying is, Hawking is actually a pretty decent movie, so if you’re interested, give it a go. But don’t watch Theory of Everything. Ew.
As a bonus mini-review, Imitation Game is actually a solidly entertaining movie. That bears almost no resemblance to reality. So take that as you will.
(I should say I know next to nothing about Hawking’s actual life, so I can only rate for accuracy where I’ve seen press coverage about it.)
Theory of Everything
This is the big Oscar-bait Eddie Redmayne biopic from a few years ago. It sucks. Don’t watch it.
It is based on Jane Hawking’s memoir (Stephen Hawking’s first wife of 30 years, and mother of his three children) and apparently bears ZERO resemblance to any reality of their marriage. So much so that Jane hates it. So that says a lot.
This movie foregrounds Hawking’s illness. It is all about his illness and his noble, good humored, saintly suffering, and Jane’s inability to deal with that. It shows her as being unhappy immediately upon marrying him. And basically implies that Stephen was kind of okay with opening the marriage and letting her have an affair if it would make her happier? Apparently, according to the memoir, Stephen Hawking is not a perfect saint all the time and can be a right bastard, you know, like actual real people. The movie shows them breaking up in a sweet tear soaked scene where they both acknowledge that it’s time to end it. Apparently the actual break up was protracted and awful and involved screaming fights, cause you can still have those with someone with ALS.
The movie also able-body-gazes his disability in a really creepy way? Like shortly after his diagnosis, there’s a scene where Jane just stares at him trying to play croquet and silently cries at his limp and his gnarled hands and his lack of coordination. It is all about the other’s gaze of his disability and her pity for him. It’s gross.
If you think I might be exaggerating that reading of the text, the climax of the film is Stephen Hawking giving a talk, and the movie slowing down time as Eddie Redmayne stands up out of the chair and straightens out all his awkward posturing and walks to hand someone a pen. I guess it’s supposed to be his fantasy? But it basically just says, “We hired an able-bodied actor to play the most famous disabled person on the planet and we’re now going to prove just how much he’s physically transformed himself for the part OSCAROSCAROSCAR.”
Don’t watch this movie.
Hawking
This is a 2004 BBC made-for-TV movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch that I likely wouldn’t know existed if the hype machine for Theory of Everything didn’t dredge up press coverage of this as well.
This is…surprisingly decent? I mean, it’s made-for-TV, and looks it. They shot most of it handheld for god knows what reason. (It may have been 2004, but this isn’t a Bourne film. I don’t need shaky cam of people in lecture halls.)
But, unlike Theory of Everything, this one is not *just* about Hawking’s disability. It focuses on his time at Cambridge, from his diagnosis to his PhD. This means that Cumberbatch is affecting some physical impairments and a speech impediment by the end of the film, but it’s not the extreme give-me-an-Oscar transformation of Theory of Everything.
This also is very subtle, surprisingly—Hawking is a person whose life evokes bad literary metaphor: He writes about TIME because he thought he HAD SO LITTLE OF IT. He is TRAPPED IN HIS BODY but his mind is as big as the UNIVERSE. Theory of Everything trades in that. Hawking doesn’t.
Things I liked about Hawking:
- The way the disability was framed by the film. Hawking shows Stephen Hawking struggling with his progressive disability, but its focus is tightly on Hawking himself. It shows him letting a bath overrun the tub because he can’t turn off the taps. It shows him trying to tell a cabbie he wants to go to Trinity College when there’s a lot of street noise and the cabbie can’t understand him through his slurred speech—and then asks him to write it down, which he can’t do. It shows him having to fight for accessible housing when the school tries to put his room up a flight of stairs he would not be able to ascend. All these things are about Hawking struggling to navigate the world, and a fair number about how ablist the world is. They are not about gazing on his disability with pity.
It also treats his disability as matter of fact. There’s a scene where he falls down the stairs of a theatre balcony, but then it cuts to him watching the play. No slow mo, no drama around it. Just—this is what his life is like. I don’t know what the progression of his illness actually was, but this portrayal rang more true to me.
- The main tension of this movie was between Hawking’s initial prognosis—they gave him two years to live—and his desire to make his mark as a scientist. There is a heartbreaking scene where his father visits his PhD advisor and asks him to give Stephen an easy problem so that he can finish his PhD before he dies. (This just breaks me—to have all your dreams for your child winnow down to just wanting them to be able to finish their degree before they die.) The advisor says he can’t do that.
There’s a scene where Hawking tries to make his mark by publicly telling a tenured professor he’s wrong during a lecture the professor is giving—and it’s framed as something he’s doing because he thinks he doesn’t have time to be remembered for his own work.
It makes clear that he starts using topology because it’s *faster* than mathematics, and he needs to get his ideas out *fast.* We in the audience know he lived a long time and accomplished many things, but the entire movie is focused on what it would be like to have a once-in-a-generation brain and not enough time to use it.
- I loved the way this movie portrayed science. A lot of the movie was about the science. (Theory of Everything, the science was barely mentioned.) It shows how collaborative science is—you see that the Big Bang theory already existed, that theories about black holes already existed, and you see Hawking working with multiple mentor figures. It makes no attempt to claim him as alone in his discoveries, but in building on a wealth of ideas already bouncing around.
When Stephen finishes his PhD, the advisor visits the parents to tell them about it. The father asks what his son has done, and the only way the advisor can explain it is to say, “He made Einstein beautiful.”
The movie has a framing device of showing two scientists being interviewed before receiving their Nobel Prize at some point in the future of the time frame of the movie. I was very confused by this—like, should I know who these people are? Why are they here? But the movie brings it together brilliantly:
When Hawking has defended his thesis, the professor he had shouted down before tells him he’s full of crap—if there were a Big Bang, there would be some evidence of it. Where’s the radiation, Stephen? Someone would have noticed. So where is it, huh?
Then you cut back to the Nobel winners and realize—they’re winning the Nobel Prize for the discovery of cosmic background radiation. This so beautifully shows how Hawking is part of a web of scientists; he theorized it, others proved it. It’s elegant.
So, yeah. What I’m saying is, Hawking is actually a pretty decent movie, so if you’re interested, give it a go. But don’t watch Theory of Everything. Ew.
As a bonus mini-review, Imitation Game is actually a solidly entertaining movie. That bears almost no resemblance to reality. So take that as you will.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-23 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-05 03:31 pm (UTC)I am also enjoying "I watched this so you don't have to."