Eddie Redmayne – Bitch Flicks

What Is ‘The Danish Girl’ About?

‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Tangerine’ collide in their allusion to the notions of gender identity, gender expression and beauty in conversations about trans women. But ‘Tangerine’ takes that necessary next step by centering and humanizing the lives of trans women, which ‘The Danish Girl’ pointedly fails to do.

This guest post by Holly Thicknes is an edited version of an article that previously appeared at Girls On Film and is cross-posted with permission.

One of the most anticipated films of January and nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, The Danish Girl is Tom Hooper’s biographical account of Lili Elbe, a transgender woman and one of the first people to ever undergo gender confirmation surgery in 1930. Taking the film firmly onto the awards stage by playing Lili is coy-smiling, softly spoken, thespian royalty Edward John David Redmayne and starring opposite as wife Gerda is the talented Alicia Vikander.

The Danish Girl is utterly gorgeous in every way except one: an ugly stain seeping through the bespoke dress fabric and luscious upholstery. As we stoke the cultural fires of 2016 on the embers of 2015’s action-packed year – the year of nationally legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S., the Black Lives Matter campaign, Jeremy Corbyn wearing socks and sandals and raising eyebrows at oncoming toff scoffs, extended Middle Eastern intervention and a mind-boggling refugee crisis in the U.K. – it becomes apparent that the latest wave of films about progress, in themselves, aren’t very progressive at all.

Let’s call it the Redmayne Phenomena. Has anyone noticed anything about Eddie? Namely that he must spend 80% of his working life in make-up. His last two critically-acclaimed roles, in The Danish Girl and The Theory of Everything, consisted of his appropriation of marginalized peoples that he is not one of in real life — an able-bodied cis man, Redmayne played a person with a disability and a trans woman. But all actors do that, don’t they? That’s what “acting” is. Yes, but it’s 2016: representation matters. Films can and should cast trans actors and trans actresses in trans roles. A cis man playing the role of a trans woman diminishes representation and can perpetuate the dangerous trope that trans women are “men in dresses,” rather than the reality that trans women are women. Is Eddie a good actor? Yes! Is Eddie the only actor? Yes – according to all major film awards bodies.

Exaggerations aside, the casting of Redmayne as this iconic trans woman in The Danish Girl spoke volumes about the kind of high-speed, edgy-but-mainstream lives that we endeavor to live nowadays (or that we are encouraged to seek out). A film like this is targeted at heteronormative audiences seeking ‘quirky cinema’ rather than LGBTQ audiences seeking authentic LGBTQ cinema, therefore it is not made for the community which it claims to represent and is a big Hollywood lie. Films such as The Danish Girl get packaged as LGBTQ cinema, allowing cis, hetero audiences who seek to be seen as alternative to the norm to watch the film and claim to be concerned with its themes. Many of us like the idea of watching LGBTQ films, but not the challenging reality of it. So we satisfy that high-brow itch by buying into this “groundbreaking” cinema stock in awards season that actually sidelines its supposedly central issue, played by acting aristocracy Redmayne who blatantly hasn’t got a clue so resorts to weeping. In the place of the pioneering heroine I expected to see, the film depicted instead a fragile chorus girl doing a terrified audition for the lead.

Released in the UK just a few months before The Danish Girl, Sean Baker’s Tangerine also claimed to centralize the stories of trans women. Unlike the former, Tangerine is a modern work of art, not because it was shot on an iPhone, as most of its surrounding press focused on. The dusty neon-orange air that rises in clouds from the Santa Monica streets is every bit as beautiful as the Wes Anderson-esque wide shots of Copenhagen in The Danish Girl, and not only because it is unashamedly devoid of aesthetic artifice and polish, but Tangerine is a masterpiece because – like the best and most memorable films – it creates its own ideology out of itself. Tangerine diverges from The Danish Girl by casting trans actresses (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) in the roles of trans women characters. The two films collide in their allusion to the notions of gender identity, gender expression and beauty in conversations about trans women. But Tangerine takes that necessary next step by centering and humanizing the lives of trans women, which The Danish Girl pointedly fails to do. Tangerine was screened for the entire sex worker community in the area it was made and at various LGBTQ centres. It holds nothing back: a bold and brave fuck-off to a heteronormative, cisnormative, conservative world determined to diminish its voice. That is the kind of film worthy of awards.

Redmayne, albeit his genuine go of it, could never have captured the same essence of struggle that trans women experience with transphobia and transmisogyny. The Danish Girl employs carefully constructed beauty to distract from this truth. And herein lies the main problem: if producers keep pumping money into generic scripts that get packaged as progressive, nothing will ever change in the film world, and many of us won’t notice. It is the same principle as dragging Meryl Streep into the first “big” film about the suffragette movement for 2 minutes to crank up its profile, instead of trying to rewrite standards in the same way that its, again, supposedly central, subject did.

So what is The Danish Girl about? Superficially, the legendary Lili Elbe. Actually, the sorrowful friendship of a married couple at odds. Retrospectively, the familiar trumpeting of the noble God-given skills of an actor we know all too well, while appropriating the identities of trans women.

Just think what it would have meant to the trans community, and for trans representation in film, if it was Mya Taylor from Tangerine who had been nominated for an Oscar instead of Eddie.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Youth’: Why We Need To Stop Giving White Guys Oscars

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and ‘Transparent’) which explains why we now have ‘The Danish Girl’ in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

Nearly five years ago, when Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech swept the Oscars I wasn’t displeased. Sure it was yet another film by men about men in which the women barely had speaking parts, but Colin Firth gave a great tortured performance in the lead and the screenplay–like the film itself–seemed to understand it wasn’t telling the “feel good” story many critics and audience members mistook Speech for: the screenwriter has said that when he told the Queen mother (the film depicts when she became Queen) that he was working on the script, she asked him to not make a film of it until after she was dead–because it would bring back too many bad memories.

I skipped Hooper’s next film: Les Misérables because it gave every sign of being the kind of gooey movie I would detest. It also had Eddie Redmayne in it and after sitting through the supposedly “based on a true story” nonsense of My Week With Marilyn in which Redmayne starred (opposite an underrated Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe), I had had enough of him. Last year Redmayne won an Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking in the bio-pic The Theory of Everything proving that an able-bodied actor has a good chance of getting an Academy Award for playing a disabled person (and as long as the able-bodied keep winning, disabled people will never be cast to play these roles themselves).

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and Transparent) which explains why we now have The Danish Girl in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like Blue Is the Warmest Color before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

The whole film feels very dated (and not just because it takes place in the early 20th century) but also, in spite of it being “based on a true story”, false. Like a bad TV movie made ten or twenty years ago, this film posits that Lili (who starts out as Einar) had a wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) who had no idea her husband was anything other than a regular guy, even though Lili was a longtime model for Gerda’s work as an illustrator and painter. When Lili wants to transition, Gerda is surprised and hurt saying, “But Lili doesn’t exist. We were playing a game.” and later cries, “I need my husband! I need to hug my husband,” just like the suburban wife of a trans woman might say on Maury.

The real-life Gerda Wegener was queer and, while the couple lived in Paris, did not keep secret her relationships with women, so the film misses the opportunity to show that the feminine qualities of Lili may have been what attracted Gerda in the first place, a possibility shows like Maury and movies like this one never consider. The film also gives short shrift to the gender politics of the time, never detailing the obstacles a woman artist like Gerda would face in that era and downplaying Lili’s decision when she transitions to stop painting–even though she had won acclaim as an artist when she was “Einar”.

This film fails on so many levels, it’s hard to pick any one aspect, but Eddie Redmayne deserves special mention. A man in a dress playing a trans women is always objectionable, but Redmayne is so woefully miscast in this role, I’ll go to any protest of the awards he will probably be nominated for. Lili Elbe was one of the first people to undergo gender affirming surgery and the toast of Paris, going to parties and modeling for Gerda in the latest, revealing fashions but Redmayne’s Lili is a whispery, skittish, drag queen full of shame (at least at first) who wears matronly dresses that come up to the neck and stretch down nearly to the ankle. Other trans woman pioneers (in the US, a generation after Elbe) were not shy, retiring or ashamed: think of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera: they, along with many femme gay men of the time became more open in their presentation as they became more outspoken in their advocacy: they developed pride in themselves to deflect the shame mainstream culture thought was their only option. In this way and many others, their mindset was much more in keeping with the rest of us in 2015 than that of anyone associated with The Danish Girl.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d88APYIGkjk” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Nearly two years ago Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty won an Oscar for best foreign language film and again, even though it was a film made by men about men, I’d enjoyed it and was happy. I didn’t know then that award would give Sorrentino the momentum to make one of the worst films I’ve seen in a theater in a long time: Youth.

In a lot of ways Youth takes the indulgences I could ignore in The Great Beauty: the whining of pampered, older, male characters and the fascination with the grotesque (but of course never, ever combining the two to find the grotesque in pampered, main older male characters) and proceeds to make an entire movie out of them. And the whisper of misogyny in Beauty becomes a scream in Youth. Michael Caine is the lead, a retired composer, and his vocal intonations are so familiar from the acting he’s phoned in through the years that, even if he were giving a good performance, at this point we wouldn’t notice. Harvey Keitel is wasted (except very briefly in the reading of one of his last lines) as his best friend, a film director, as is Rachel Weisz as the composer’s grown daughter and Jane Fonda as an aging actress wearing too much makeup (I can’t believe people are talking about nominating Fonda for an award for this role. Her part isn’t a character, it’s an incoherent tempter tantrum). Like The Great Beauty, Youth has great cinematography (again by Luca Bigazzi) but when the results are this loathsome, I’m reminded of how much I would rather see a dimly lit, poorly shot film with a great script than another monstrosity with great stills. As other critics have pointed out, if this film is a leading contender for an Oscar we’re in trouble–or maybe it’s the Oscars, and their increasing irrelevance, which are.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T7CM4di_0c” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Jupiter Ascending’: Female-centric Fantasy That’s Not Quite Feminist

So yes, ‘Jupiter Ascending’ provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy. What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills.

Poster for 'Jupiter Ascending' — Poster for ‘Jupiter Ascending’

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have entirely missed the existence of The Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending. Bumped from last summer to a mercy-kill February release, it was panned by critics and ignored by audiences. Save the fannishly inclined, largely female Tumblr users who happen to populate my dashboard, who completely lost their minds over this movie. I blinked and missed its momentary theatrical release and had to wait for it on video to find out if it met the subculture hype. And I am here to report that Jupiter Ascending is a delightful cheesy sci-fi flick, if you’re into that sort of thing. And while it isn’t a feminist triumph in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road is (and even that movie’s feminism has been called into question), Jupiter Ascending is unusually suited to a female viewership, which is sadly still rather revolutionary, particularly for a genre flick.

Why does this spaceship look like a fancy mechanical fish? Why doesn't yours!? — Why does this spaceship look like a fancy mechanical fish? Why doesn’t yours!?

Gavia Baker-Whitlaw’s Daily Dot piece “Why Women Love Jupiter Ascending“ notes that its story “is the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One” usually with a hyper-competent and hot “Strong Female Character” acting as his guide through his Newly Discovered Destiny. In Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis’s Jupiter Jones is a mild-mannered housecleaner who discovers she is actually solar system royalty after Genetically Engineered Space Werewolf Channing Tatum rescues her from an alien attack. Jupiter finds that she is at the center of a war between three royal Jovian siblings (yes I just had to look up the demonym for Jupiter I love my life) who all seek to control Earth and its seven billion harvestable humans so they can rejuvenate their youth by bathing in Soylent Green Espom Salts. She has a claim to Earth because she is the reincarnation of their mother and is also immune to bee stings. Or something. (The intricacies of the plot are not important, I only recount them here because they amuse me.)

Bees don't sting solar system royalty for some reason. — Bees don’t sting solar system royalty for some reason.

So yes, Jupiter Ascending provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy (you really need to be MORE important, cishet white dudes?). What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills, as we see with our once-mundane male Chosen Ones from The Matrix‘s Neo to The Lego Movie‘s Emmett to Wanted‘s Whatever-James-McAvoy’s-character-was-named. She never eclipses the badassness of her Trinity-equivalent, the aforementioned Genetically-Engineered Space Werewolf, Caine Wise (one of the great joys of the film is when people call him “Wise” while he’s doing foolishly reckless things. I’m not sure if that was intentional). Caine needs to rescue Jupiter throughout the film; his preferred style of rescue is to give her a piggyback ride while he zooms around on his gravity-defying space rollerblades. If all these absurd details haven’t convinced you to watch this movie yet, I’m not sure what will. When she’s on her own, Jupiter’s “action” is largely about contract law.

Jupiter gets a lot of piggyback rides from Caine

Because Jupiter’s secret importance doesn’t come with previously untapped hyper-competence or the unique importance of her particular abilities, it is simply a royal birthright. She’s more along the lines of The Princess Diaries‘ Mia Thermopolis than Neo. And women aren’t really wanting for “you are actually a princess!” narratives. There are 30-odd Disney movies about that. Jupiter Ascending isn’t a power fantasy, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Women already have "you're really a princess!" stories — Women already have “you’re really a princess!” stories

But it is still a fantasy for women in a big-budget sci fi movie, which is incredibly rare. Is that why Jupiter Ascending flopped at the box office, or at least why the studio lost confidence in it as a potential summer release? I suspect it has more to do with the current difficulty selling big movies without source material. If even the Wachowskis’ own Matrix trilogy (which provided the very namesake of Tasha Robinson’s Trinity Syndrome) couldn’t bring in a new era of original sci-fi blockbusters (the only two I can think of are Avatar and Pacific Rim), the failure of Jupiter Ascending seems foretold. So hopefully studios will focus on Jupiter Ascending‘s lack of source material rather than its female protagonist when they try to avoid making other movies that meet its fate. Then again, only basing movies on properties that already exist will perpetuate male-dominated stories. So we’re kinda screwed either way, which isn’t an unfamiliar position for feminist film fans.

Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax (that's the kind of character name you get with 'Jupiter Ascending') — Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax (that’s the kind of character name you get with *Jupiter Ascending*)

Jupiter Ascending might go on to be a cult classic, and if you like bizarre scifi you should help it get there. I didn’t even get into Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne’s astonishingly campy performance as Balem Abrasax, who prefers the cape-but-no-shirt look and only speaks in whispers and screams (in the alternate universe where Jupiter Ascending was released in Summer 2014, Michael Keaton gazes lovingly upon his Best Actor Oscar). While Jupiter Ascending deserves accolades for providing female-centric fantasy, it doesn’t go the distance to become a truly feminist film (it is certainly nine or ten notches below Mad Max: Fury Road, which doesn’t even meet the bar for some people). But while I can’t recommend Jupiter Ascending as a feminist film, I do recommend it as a fun film. They can’t all have Furiosa.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer who sadly has been stung by bees.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Diversity Sells — But Hollywood Remains Overwhelmingly White, Male at NPR

Feminism’s oppression obsession undermines women by Shikha Dalmia at The Week

The Latest: Black Women by Brianna Cox at For Harriet

Patricia Arquette’s Feminism: Only for White Women by Amanda Marcotte at Slate

Carnival of Souls: A Coming of Age Story for Queer Women? by Casey Quinlan at The Toast

Yes on Knope by Rachel Fields at Bitch Media

Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock Taught Us Acceptance Is Highly Logical by Eric Deggans at NPR

Leonard Nimoy’s Advice To A Biracial Girl In 1968 by Gene Demby at NPR

Black History & Women in Horror Month: Get To Know Marsha A. Hunt by Ashlee Blackwell at Graveyard Shift Sisters

Interview: The Activist Survivors of “The Hunting Ground” by Michele Kort at Ms. blog

What Happened When a Handsome, White Actor Shed a Tear Over ‘Glory’ by Kirsten West Savali at The Root

“Fresh Off the Boat” Takes on Sexual Harrassment and Consent by Victoria Law at Bitch Media

First Look at Eddie Redmayne as ‘The Danish Girl’ in Tom Hooper Drama by Linda Ge at The Wrap

Pussy Riot’s “Don’t Cry Genocide” Featuring Le Tigre Members Appears on “House of Cards” by Evan Minsker at Pitchfork

A Toxic Stew: Risks To Women Of Public Feminism by Barbara King at NPR

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘The Theory of Everything’: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had ‘Frida’ a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like ‘Frida,’ directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. ‘The Theory of Everything,’ the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

Like a lot of women, I’m impatient with the “great man” films that invade theaters every year just in time for Oscar consideration. The main character is always a man whose name we all know, played by an actor who really wants an Academy Award. We see his earliest struggles then later, his triumphs. The addition of some failures never succeeds in making the film more interesting, just longer.

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too; they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking, seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

But the movie begins by focusing on him (Eddie Redmayne) not her, as he rides a bike, attends classes as a Ph.D. student in the early 1960s at Cambridge and acts as a coxswain (complete with megaphone) for the crew rowing on the river. Hawking meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a student mixer and they become a couple. Hawking’s physical awkwardness could pass for that of any geeky man who considers his body merely a container for his brain, but we know what’s coming before the characters do when we see scenes in which Hawking trips and falls in a train station or his hand folds in on itself as he writes equations on a blackboard. When he has a fall in the yard he receives his diagnosis, ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), along with the news “Life expectancy is two years.”

At first he avoids Jane and holes up in his room, but after she finds out from his friends about his illness, in a scene we’ve all watched in countless other films, she marches into his room and declares, “I want us to be together for as long as we’ve got.” Stephen resumes his studies and for his thesis topic chooses “time.” He and Jane get married and start to have children soon after.

What follows is a portrait of a marriage that combines all the elements of pre-second-wave feminism at once: Jane has to set aside her studies not just to care for her very young children, to make all the meals and clean the house, but also to care for her husband, whose mobility is rapidly deteriorating, even though he’s still a relatively young adult. At the point where he can walk only with the assistance of two canes and can maneuver the stairs in his house only by lying flat on his back and grasping with his few remaining functional fingers the railing to pull himself up or down, we see Stephen hand in a typed dissertation with a barely legible shaky signature; I couldn’t help wondering if the person who typed it was Jane, since he seems unlikely to have been able to do so himself–and so many wives in that era were also their husbands’ de facto secretaries. We’re also seeing an era in which care for disabled family members was often left to a wife or mother (as opposed to paid staff, unless the family was very wealthy), and no one, not Hawking’s family nor Jane’s, ever thinks of taking over his care for even a few hours at a time to give Jane some respite. On the drive back from a dinner at his family’s hillside cottage in the country, a teary Jane tells Hawking she needs help, but he cuts off any further discussion.

TheoryBed — Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking

Later Jane’s mother can see how stressed she is and (instead of offering to help) suggests she join a church choir (Jane is a regular churchgoer, a contrast to her outspoken, atheist husband). She then meets the handsome choirmaster, Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who becomes a family friend and also helps with Stephen’s care. Stephen seems to see the spark between his wife and Jonathan from the beginning and lets her know in an indirect way that she is free to pursue the relationship. Here the film is at its most interesting: too many “great man” films seem to sum up the wife or girlfriend character struggle of living with the great man as “she was a saint” without considering that she might have needs of her own. Jane’s situation also parallels many others of the 50s and 60s when women got married in their early 20s and found in their 30s and 40s their marriages did not fulfill their own expectations and ambitions. Jane remains devoted to Stephen but is at her happiest when she spends time with Jonathan. The closeness of their relationship invites the scrutiny of others at the christening of her third child, when her mother-in-law follows her into the kitchen and declares the family has a “right to know” whether the child is Jonathan’s. Jane replies that the child’s father could not be anyone but Stephen.

When Stephen has the health crisis that robs him of the ability to talk without assistance, Jonathan steps back and nurses come into the home to help Stephen, along with a man who designs a device through which Stephen can talk again, by slowly “typing” (actually clicking a monitor to choose letters and phrases) and having an electronic voice read the words. Stephen becomes very close to one nurse in particular, Elaine (Maxine Peake), who even helps him to look through the copies of Penthouse that come to his office. He eventually leaves Jane for her. An end title tells us that Jane eventually got her Ph.D., married Jonathan, and that she and Stephen are still friends.

EverythingSpeaks — Jane watches Stephen “speak” through a device while the woman who will be his second wife looks on.

What the film leaves out are the most interesting parts of the story–not just Hawking’s scientific work (we get explanations that are so oversimplified they don’t make much sense), but also that the nurse Stephen lived with (and eventually married and divorced) was the wife of the man who created his speaking device–and that she was also investigated after other caregivers alleged she physically abused Stephen (during their relationship he had unexplained bruises, broken bones and burns). When Jane did publicity for a previous movie based on her and Stephen’s relationship, she said she couldn’t comment on Elaine (who was still married to Stephen then) for legal reasons. She did admit during interviews that she was friends with Stephen mainly for the sake of the children. And she and Stephen weren’t a couple when he was diagnosed, their romance blossomed afterward, which Jane described as being in keeping with the great optimism of the early 1960s that ran parallel with the belief that nuclear war between the super powers could, at any moment, wipe out the world.

Redmayne does a credible job as Hawking (whose character in the film is much more sympathetic than Jane and news sources have portrayed him; this Hawking never runs over anyone’s toes “accidentally” with his electric wheelchair), especially in the later scenes where we see a certain impishness in his face (very like the real-life Hawking’s), while most of his features remain immobile. Jones as Jane does a serviceable job too, but I wish she had been allowed to look and dress less like Jean Shrimpton (the British supermodel popular in the era when the film begins). At least Redmayne (who is also more conventionally pretty than the person he plays) gets to mess up his hair and wear unflattering glasses; Jones, for much of the film, until she starts wearing a crappy short wig and half-assed “aging” makeup, looks like she could have stepped out of a stodgy, British clothing catalogue, even when Jane has three kids and a disabled husband to take care of, and, as Jane points out in her book, and is briefly referenced in the film, very little money. The filmmakers (screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh) didn’t seem to think any of these details were worth including. The Theory of Everything is a good, if very conventional, film, but the real story it’s based on could have been made into a great one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8QYUgO-tZo”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender