The Theory of Everything
"Do you need your biopic crutches?”
Jake Kasdan's 2007 genre parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story so effectively skewered the hoary tropes of movie biopics, any film employing them with a straight face risks looking ridiculous. Cliches are not mandatory for the genre—films as diverse as Todd Haynes' I'm Not There and Mike Leigh's upcoming Mr. Turner have tossed aside biopic crutches while still landing emotional and intellectual impacts. But James Marsh's straight-faced biopic The Theory of Everything is engineered for maximum awards season appeal, and so it crams in as many those conventions as it possibly can. The film might be unwatchable if not for the excellent performances from Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne as Jane and Stephen Hawking. Redmayne especially does bravura work—he becomes Stephen Hawking, body and soul—but The Theory of Everything doesn't have the imagination or ambition to be anything more than his showpiece.
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