The new Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything opened a little wider this weekend and I caught it. It’s the life story – largely focused on his romance and marriage – of Hawking and his wife Jane. It’s an imperfect movie that spends too much time on the personal and glosses over the science and his career in general (especially for a movie called “The Theory of Everything”). I grew impatient with long scenes focused, in my mind, on the wrong topics. Those are important topics but there’s so much more to his life than his relationship with his wife.

The movie almost seemed disinterested in anything that made him famous. It is a balancing act, I get that. How much physics do you put into a movie and risk losing your audience when you are going for mass appeal. I don’t know the answer to that but A Brief History of Time sought to popularize physics but ultimately didn’t pull any punches and it made a ton of book sales. There had to be a better mix here though – it spends an endless amount of time dancing around troubles in the marriage and there’s something very good to say about what it must be like to be married to a brilliant mind trapped in a cage of his own body. Honestly though, it didn’t even get that angle quite right.

Eddie Redmayne does a fine – maybe even excellent – job showing the man from his early life college up to the publishing of A Brief History of Time. I’d say it’s an excellent performance – and it is – but it’s largely an imitation.

Overall, this is a fine but unexceptional movie with its focus too rigorously pointed in the wrong direction. A fairly average biopic about a greater than average person.

Score: 75