Looking after this particular family, of course, is a full-time job that takes an enormous toll on Jane, whom Jones invests with warmth, spirit and a determination motivated as much by her character’s religious faith as by her love for Stephen. One of the more refreshing aspects of “The Theory of Everything” is the way it acknowledges what it really means to be long-suffering wife, that regular yet often strictly decorative fixture of far too many great-man Hollywood biopics. In Jane’s case, that means fending off nasty rumors and her own undeniable temptations when her church choirmaster, a handsome and sensitive widower named Jonathan Hellyer Jones (a fine Charlie Cox), becomes a close family friend, informal caretaker to Stephen and rowdy father figure to the kids.
The later passages are replete with sniffle-inducing sentiments, underplayed marital tensions and no shortage of amusing jokes, drawing on Stephen’s seemingly bottomless reserves of self-deprecating humor. Eventually the story arrives at the painful matter of the couple’s divorce, in scenes that feel somewhat truncated and show clear signs of genteel narrative airbrushing: Understandably, the filmmakers chose to adapt not Jane Hawking’s angry and controversial 1999 tell-all, “Music to Move the Stars,” but rather her more tempered and forgiving 2008 follow-up, “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen,” and their sympathies feel more or less evenly divided between two individuals who remain friends even after the end of their marriage.
It’s worth noting that “The Theory of Everything” derives its title from Hawking’s tireless search for a single universal equation that will account for all existence, reconciling quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity; dramatically speaking, the filmmakers seem to have incorporated that principle by extending a generous spirit of inclusion toward nearly everyone onscreen. Admittedly, they can’t resist aiming a few bitchy jabs at Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake), the protective and strong-willed nurse whom Stephen married in 1995 (and whom he divorced in 2006), but even she comes off as well as she could under the circumstances.
Elsewhere, McCarten’s script offers a clipped overview of Hawking’s achievements while keeping the scientific and mathematical discourse at a level that laypeople in the audience will readily comprehend, employing such figures as Cambridge professor and leading cosmologist Dennis Sciama (David Thewlis) to tease out Hawking’s head-spinning notions about black holes, space-time singularities and the boundaries of the universe. Elsewhere, the film resorts to effective if elementary visual associations: A cheerfully blazing fire neatly serves up the second law of thermodynamics, while the sight of Stephen and Jane twirling beside the river Cam playfully and romantically underscores the reversibility of time.
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