The story of the planet’s most famous cosmologist, told for the first time in his own words and by those closest to him, documentary Hawking is an engaging, inspirational portrait of as unlikely an iconic figure as the last half-century has produced. If modern celebrity culture values glamour, sexiness, vitality and youth — or, failing that, healthy dollops of tawdriness and puffed-up confrontation — British-born scientist Stephen Hawking is the antithesis of those qualities. And yet, beginning in the 1970s, he managed to drag physics and related topics into the popular discourse.
Directed by Stephen Finnigan, Hawking chronicles its subject’s incredible journey from childhood to PhD candidate, scientific genius and bestselling author. Though known worldwide in his wheelchair-bound form, Hawking, now 71, actually enjoyed a full and normal childhood with his siblings, and this film sketches out that adolescence in fanciful, winning fashion. Diagnosed in his 20s with a motor neuron disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS), Hawking was given only two or three years to live; though he’s beaten the odds to live a long and full life, his condition is a degenerative one, and it’s robbed him of speech and almost all movement (apart from a few muscles in his cheek) over time.
Among Hawking’s scientific breakthroughs are the idea that black holes emit particles of radiation, and a cosmological singularity that finds union in the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Hawking, though, scales these monumental breakthroughs in science in a very human way. Part of this has to do with the way that Finnigan cannily interweaves interview segments with a variety of subjects — former students and contemporaries, plus caregivers and Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde — along with tastefully staged re-enactments that capture the feeling of moments.
Hawking’s droll sense of humor pokes through often as well. Recounting the onset of his disease, he says, “I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner.” Later, describing the emotions attached to scientific breakthrough, he says, “There is nothing like the ‘eureka’ moment when you discover something no one has known before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”
The dual spine of the film lies in Hawking’s commitment to crafting a mainstream-accessible tome about physics and the Big Bang Theory — which he did with A Brief History of Time, which would go on to sell over 10 million copies — and his rather easy embrace of celebrity (surprisingly, even Jim Carrey pops up). The latter, for better or worse (it cost Hawking at least one of his two marriages), can be viewed from several perspectives, depending on one’s level of cynicism. But the love that Hawking has outwardly manifested, and indeed radiated, in pursuit of asking the big questions about life and solving the difficulties of the universe’s creation have a broader lesson and application. As Hawking himself says near the film’s end, “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and excel at.” Hawking opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. (Quad Cinema/Vertigo Films/Film 4, unrated, 94 minutes)
