It would be nice if producers of science movies spent half as much time on getting the science right as they do on, say, wardrobes or hairstyles.
I’m tired of complaining about this, but we are in an extraordinary run of such movies right now, and I’d love to see one that doesn’t make me gnash my teeth.
Last year, “Gravity,” which won seven Oscars, delivered amazingly realistic depictions of space hardware and weightlessness, but bungled the simple rules of orbital mechanics. Next week will bring us not one but two movies with black holes at their core: “The Theory of Everything,” about the early life and times of Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and best-selling author; and “Interstellar,” directed and written by the Nolan brothers, Christopher and Jonathan, about astronauts traveling through a wormhole to find a new home for humanity. (Intriguingly, it is based on work by one of Dr. Hawking’s oldest buddies, Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.)
Directing ‘The Theory of Everything’
The Academy Award-winning director James Marsh discusses his newest project, “The Theory of Everything,” which chronicles the life of the cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
Video by Carrie Halperin on Publish Date October 27, 2014.“The Theory of Everything” has a lot going for it. Eddie Redmayne is justly being promoted for an Oscar nomination for his uncanny portrayal of Dr. Hawking and the relentless wasting effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, for which any number of celebrities have lately endured an orgy of ice-bucket drenchings.
Millions of people and science fans who have read Dr. Hawking’s books, flocked to his lectures and watched him on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek” and “The Big Bang Theory” have never known him except as a wheelchaired figure speaking in a robotic voice; for all they know he was always that way and floated down to Earth on a comet, like Venus drifting in on a half-shell.
Mr. Redmayne’s performance — from the gnarled, paralyzed fingers to the mischievous spark that lights an otherwise frozen face as he savors a joke or a bon mot — is spot on. The dramatic high point, when he clicks a mouse and the words “My name is Stephen Hawking” come out of a speaker with a robotic American accent, is a genuine creation moment. There were tears in my eyes.
But the movie doesn’t deserve any prizes for its drive-by muddling of Dr. Hawking’s scientific work, leaving viewers in the dark about exactly why he is so famous. Instead of showing how he undermined traditional notions of space and time, it panders to religious sensibilities about what his work does or does not say about the existence of God, which in fact is very little.
To its credit, the movie does not shy away from the darker parts of Dr. Hawking’s story. It is based on the 2007 memoir “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen,” by his first wife, Jane Wilde — one of two books she has written about what it was like to fall in love with and then care for an increasingly disabled and celebrated genius. Jane eventually takes up with the choirmaster at her church; Stephen wheels away with his nurse Elaine Mason, whom he subsequently married and then divorced.
Dr. Hawking, 72, is said to have signed off, if reluctantly, on a movie that would fill in the personal side of his life. Of all the courageous things he has done, this might have been the bravest: entrusting his life story to an ex-wife.
He allowed the producers to use actual recordings of his iconic voice, and after seeing the movie he pronounced it “broadly true,” according to the director, James Marsh, who won an Oscar for the 2008 documentary “Man on Wire.”
But when it came to science, I couldn’t help gnashing my teeth after all. Forget for a moment that early in the story the characters are sitting in a seminar in London talking about black holes, the bottomless gravitational abysses from which not even light can escape, years before that term had been coined. Sadly, a few anachronisms are probably inevitable in a popular account of such an arcane field as astrophysics.
It gets worse, though. Skip a few scenes and years ahead. Dr. Hawking, getting ready for bed, is staring at glowing coals in the fireplace and has a vision of black holes fizzing and leaking heat.
The next thing we know he is telling an audience in an Oxford lecture hall that black holes, contrary to legend and previous theory, are not forever, but will leak particles, shrink and eventually explode, before a crank moderator declares the session over, calling the notion “rubbish.”
The prediction of Hawking radiation, as it is called, is his greatest achievement, the one he is most likely to get a Nobel Prize for. But it didn’t happen with a moment of inspiration staring at a fireplace. And in telling the story this way, the producers have cheated themselves out of what was arguably the most dramatic moment in his scientific career.
Dr. Hawking had been goaded by work by Alexei Starobinsky in Moscow and Jacob Bekenstein in Princeton into trying to determine the properties of microscopic black holes. That required a daunting calculation that would combine quantum theory with Einsteinian gravity, twin poles of theoretical physics thought until then to be mathematically incompatible.
It took months, during which his friends and colleagues were sure he would fail. They propped quantum textbooks open in front of him and then went away, wondering what if anything would come of him.
When Dr. Hawking discovered that quantum effects would make black holes leaky, it went against all his intuition and expectations. He spent a couple of lonely months trying to figure out where he had gone wrong, at one point locking himself in a bathroom to think. The penumbra of uncertainty and randomness with which quantum theory endowed nature on the smallest scales would in effect pierce the black hole’s previously inviolable surface. His discovery has turned out to be a big, big deal, because it implies, among other things, that three-dimensional space is an illusion. Do we live in a hologram, like the picture on a credit card? Or the Matrix?
None of this, alas, is in the movie. That is more than bad history. The equations on the blackboard appear to be authentic — the movies are always great at getting the design details right — but as usual it misses the big picture, the zigzaggy path of collaboration, competition and even combat by which science actually progresses. By leaving out people like Dr. Bekenstein and Dr. Starobinsky, the movie reinforces the stereotype of the lone genius already ingrained by the media and the Nobel Prizes.
In Dr. Hawking’s case the stereotype is compounded by his disability, which causes the rest of the world — especially the media — to regard his every statement as if it came from the Delphic oracle.
It also devalues Dr. Hawking’s own work, the months of intense calculation that are required to turn inspiration into a real theory, by making it look easy. Science isn’t easy, even for the Einsteins among us, which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
“The Theory of Everything” is only a movie, and I should be thrilled that Dr. Hawking is at last getting his due from the star-making machinery of the big screen and that black holes are even part of the cultural discourse. And I am. It is, as Dr. Hawking said, “broadly true.”
But at the risk of coming off as a cranky nerd, I wish the moviemakers had been able to hew to a higher authority.