‘The Theory of Everything’ avoids cliches but is still too glossy to ring true

“The Theory of Everything” is a portrait of a marriage, but not just any marriage. It’s about the joys and pains of a marriage with a man living with Lou Gehrig’s disease. And, oh yeah, that man just happens to be the world famous physicist Stephen Hawking.

Since the movie involves a celebrity, there’s a natural, built-in curiosity about his romantic life. Hawking’s body is so twisted by his disease, it may come as a shock to some that he was married for 30 years and fathered three children.

“The Theory of Everything” covers all those years – from his brilliant Cambridge student days before his diagnosis, through the balancing act he and his wife have to maintain between his scholarly work and his deteriorating condition, all the way to his eventual recognition by the Queen herself as a scientist of the highest order.

It can’t help but be inspirational, but the film deserves some credit for not reducing itself to just another cliched, and sentimentalized, triumph-over-adversity story. There’s triumph all right, but there’s also romantic strife that makes the story more compelling than one might expect.

But even granting that, “The Theory of Everything” still seems too glossy and cursory to ring completely true.

It’s an enjoyable and engaging movie that only has time to examine the shallows of the heart, and not its depths.

Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife Jane are both getting talked up for Oscar consideration and both are deserving. Redmayne is excellent, not only in embodying the physical manifestations of the disease, but also in projecting Hawking’s natural wit and humor in spite of his limited capacity to speak. And Jones portrays Jane as not just long-suffering in her devotion but also torn about whether her sacrifice is too self-abnegating.

I most appreciate the film’s willingness to deal with the awkward fact that both Jane and Hawking form emotional attachments outside their marriage. That makes for more complex characters than you might expect to meet in your standard love story bio-pic.

But even so, the movie treads so lightly upon this ground that it still feels whitewashed. (And if the wife’s first book about her marriage is true, it was a lot rockier than this movie even hints at.)

Bottom line, “The Theory of Everything” is a soft-hearted treatment of a hard relationship. Very affecting, yes, but unfulfilling too.