M.C. Escher Worth the Trip of Your Choice

M. C. ESHER

M. C. Escher: Reality and Illusion

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH

Through January 5, 2015

Impossible staircases, strange insect-like creatures furling and unfurling, a set of disembodied hands drawing each other into existence…. It was all so trippy and off-kilter that those of us who first saw the work of M. C. Esher in the 1960s and ‘70s simply assumed he was one of us—perhaps some acid-fueled poster artist from the Bay area.

He was actually a Dutchman, Mauritis Cornelius Escher, who was born in 1898 and checked off the planet in 1972, just about the time Baby Boomers were checking him out. Moreover, he was more Straight Arrow than Acid Rocker and he drew his inspirations from Tuscan architecture and Moorish designers, not countercultural ideals. He blew his mind in San Gimignano, not San Francisco, and with mathematics, not controlled substances.

The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, a small jewel, showcases Escher’s biography and work. It’s a perfect setting as, like Escher’s work, Manchester isn’t quite what first-time visitors expect. Once the world’s largest textile manufacturing center, Manchester is a gritty postindustrial city, whose red- brick factories stretch along the Merrimack River as far as the eye can see. Yet scattered among the decline are the remnants of the past wealth that endowed the Currier, and tenuous gentrification projects as fanciful as some of Escher’s works and might just fuel a brighter future.

The Currier exhibit on Escher is exhaustive. It opens with Escher’s earliest commercial graphic works, nature studies, landscapes, and prints. Escher gained such renown for his later mind-bending works that it’s easy to overlook his considerable printmaking skills. He excelled in all forms of printmaking—lithography, woodcuts, linoleum blocks, mezzotints, and several others that were unfamiliar to me. His artistic life took a dramatic turn when he toured Italy in 1922, the beginning of a journey that took him across Europe to study and work, but also to escape war. Italy’s medieval and Spain’s Moorish pasts precipitated a shift from pure to imaginative design. Escher had no formal training in mathematics, but non-representational geometry such as Möbius strips and ambiguous triangles became a staple of Escher’s works.

A tesselation and Mobius strip

The Currier exhibit highlights Escher’s draftsmanship and his intuitive grasp of both practical and improbable geometry. From Spanish tile makers he learned tessellation, patterns without overlap in which one design bleeds seamlessly into the next. A famed Escher technique was to begin with an abstract line of forms that slowly evolve into recognizable birds or insects. But look closely, as Escher liked to mess with our perceptions. Some of his tessellations construct, then deconstruct; others shift our focus in ways that we accept subconsciously before our reason centers alert us that we’ve been visually hoodwinked. Escher often did this in the simplest possible manner, such as changing the flight patterns of a flock of birds by slowly adding one color while deemphasizing the previously dominant hue.

Relativity

Famed Escher works such as Relativity (1953) relied upon Necker cubes and Penrose triangles. Remember how you first learned how to draw a cube that appears as three-dimensional by sketching two squares whose points you connected? Do the same thing with top and bottom trapezoids and your Necker cube looks quite different. Hide some of these in a composition with some Penrose triangles whose sides are drawn in such a way as to create an architecturally impossible figure. That’s how Escher gave us pillars that support nothing, interlaced staircases that do not interconnect, and spatial planes whose dimensionality is both everywhere and nowhere. As we used to say, “Far out!”

Check out the columns!

Escher was neither a bohemian nor a child of the 60s, but his art anticipated the altered states of William Burroughs and it flung open wide Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception. You have just weeks left to get to Manchester. If you can’t make it, at least upload some of Escher’s work and study it. Don’t surf—look hard and deep. Prepare to have your mind blown.  Rob Weir  

Force Majeure is a Flurry, not an Avalanche

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FORCE MAJEURE (2014)

Directed and written by Ruben Örtlund

Magnolia Pictures, 118 minutes, R (for brief nudity and cursing in Swedish)

*

Swedish director Ruben Örtlund has a good photographic eye. He serves up jaw-dropping views of the French Alps and gorgeously textured shots of small domestic moments such as a family tranquilly snoozing in their matching long johns. Alas, he's a lousy scriptwriter and director. The term force majeure is used in legal proceedings to refer to an event such as a flood, hurricane, or other unavoidable accident that relieves parties of liability. Nice try, but Örtlund bears the blame for this film. There's no sense pulling any punches; Force Majeure is a very bad and very boring film.

It centers on a Yuppie Swedish couple, Tomas (Johannes Kahnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their oh-so-perfect children Harry and Vera. Tomas is work-obsessed and addicted to his cellphone, but perhaps a ski vacation in the French Alps is just what is needed to reconnect with his child-centered wife and his privileged, but pouting brood. Or, maybe not! Things go wrong on day two when a resort-induced avalanche gets a bit too close to the resort and terrifies lunchtime patrons. In the end, no one is hurt as what appeared to be a wall of snow was but an icy fog rolling off the edge of the snow slide. However, Tomas' frightened every-man-for-himself bolt leaves Ebba shattered and throws an already troubled marriage into deeper crisis when he denies that he put his own safety above that of his family.

I guess this is a metaphor for something: Deep-seated abandonment desires? Lack of virility? Male selfishness? How risk aversion leads to stultifying stasis? The sterility of middle-class life? Tomas' flight leads Ebba to question her own life. Should she have an affair like the free-spirited woman she meets in the pub? Walk away from her marriage? Make it work? Does Tomas need to go to an Iron John seminar to recoup his masculine Mojo? Do a 180 and become a Sensitive New Age Guy? Copy his buddy Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and take up with a mistress half his age? Do we care? Nope! The film's premise is thinner than the Alpine air and any gravitas it appears to have is but a passing fog. You can safely nod off for long stretches. Any time something even remotely dramatic happens—like Tomas forgetting his room key card––Ola Flottum's score gives us a cheesy organ treatment of Vivaldi to warn us to pay close attention. (Seriously, Boris Karloff would have rejected this music—and that's no slam on Vivaldi.) 

Force Majeure is really about rich Yuppies suffering from problems of their own manufacture—making an Alp out of an anthill, if you will. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the patently absurd manner in which Tomas and Ebba at least temporarily resolve their differences. (For those of you who must see this film despite my warning, pay attention to the film's final ski sequence. Then email me with the subject line "You told me so!") Worse still, Örtlund takes two hours to tell a non-tale that warrants 30 minutes at best. My favorite moments in the film itself—as opposed to still shots–involved observing Hivju's impressive red beard. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a metaphor for how bored I was.—Rob Weir

Abolish the Police?

Readers of this blog know that I have reservations about the Ferguson, Missouri case. In short, I think the grand jury was correct in its assumption that the prosecution did not present compelling evidence to allow for the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of unarmed African American Michael Brown. That very well might be the prosecuting attorney’s fault and, if locals feel that way, they probably ought to launch a recall vote. Given what the grand jury saw and heard, though, non-indictment appears to be the right call. (It at least leaves open the possibility of a future indictment.)

I have no such reservations about an incident on Staten Island—there is no justification whatsoever for Officer Daniel Pantaleo to apply the banned choke hold on Eric Garner that resulted in his death. Garner wasn’t engaged in dangerous activity—he was selling individual cigarettes on the street, an activity common among panhandlers and poor folks. It’s illegal, but let’s not confuse this with an assault on public order. Pantaleo is, at minimum, guilty of involuntary manslaughter in any court less biased than cover-your-ass police (CYA) culture.

Here in Massachusetts we have our own scandal involving cops getting away with murder. As it turns out, quite a few Bay State cops busting drunk drivers are cruising the streets while intoxicated and several have been involved in fatal accidents for which they were never charged. Here’s how you do it. Drunkenly kill a motorist or two, wait for an investigating officer to arrive, refuse a breathalyzer test, and rely upon the CYA ‘professional courtesy’ of your fellow officer. In Massachusetts, refusing to take the test is an automatic 180-day suspension of license, an inconvenience but hardly on par with the 13 to15-year sentence a Hampshire County judge just imposed on a Central American immigrant—who confessed, by the way—for the DUI double fatality he caused. Can you say ‘miscarriage of justice?’

It’s time to take action and one way do so is simply to abolish police—fire every one of them, including the “good” cops. I’m not suggesting some misty-eyed human-nature-is good-we-can-take-care-of-each-other utopian solution. I’m suggesting we nod to reality and admit that policing is an outdated concept that can be more efficiently and fairly done by technology and the US military.

We don’t need traffic cops any more, nor have they ever been particularly successful in making the streets safer. Here’s what does work: tamper-proof speed generals in vehicles that prevent engines from accelerating over a set speed, and traffic cameras that record bad driving. The latter have been in place in Canada and Europe for years. Want to tool down the interstate at 90 mph? Your fine will come in the mail. I can hear the anguished screams of “Big Brother” and “invasion of privacy.” My response: “Grow up! This battle is as over and lost as the Vietnam War.” Have we learned nothing in the post-9/11world? The simple truth is that you are being watched. Or did you think eye-witnesses solved the Boston Marathon bombing? Or that changing your password protects you from phishing? Or that laws prevent access to your “private” information? Or perhaps you think your license plates aren’t already being recorded. Ever go through a tollbooth? Ever drive by a ‘secure’ building? Cameras are everywhere, so don’t confuse privacy rights with your desire to drive like an idiot whenever you wish. If you want safer streets and maximum patrol coverage, lose the cops and bring on the cameras. Need backup? Drones can police the roads better than cops in cars.

Another outdated concept is ‘community policing.’ It’s pretty simple: bad guys don’t want to play basketball with cops and, if they’re bad enough, no one else in the community is going play tattletale; they’re smart enough to know that Officer Friendly can’t protect them from gangs. Moreover, community policing spawns the problematic CYA culture of Massachusetts, Staten Island, and (maybe) Ferguson.

Who can protect us better than rogue cops and their CYA accessories? How about the US military? In an earlier post I suggested an Italian-style carabinieri. It's not a perfect solution, but it does trend better than today’s police culture. There are 1.1 million full-time cops in the USA and another 100,000 part-timers. The US military is much larger: 1.37 on active duty and another 850,000 reservists.

In an earlier post I noted that the military is lousy at winning foreign wars, so let’s let soldiers train on American streets. Save the dough spent on cops and assess states and municipalities fees that go into the Pentagon budget. Among the advantages:

·      The US military is the most integrated body in American society, so no more white cops with seniority in black neighborhoods.

·      Police forces are increasingly militarized. Doesn’t it make sense to let those trained in this technology use it instead of amateurs?

·      Military personnel can be rotated regularly, which discourages corruption and payoffs. I’ll take dispassionate cops over community policing.

·      The US military has more trained investigators than any prosecuting attorney.

·      The military is, as a rule, more disciplined, physically fit, and duty-bound than most police forces.

·      It’s likely to be cheaper. (For a start, taxpayers wouldn’t be double-billed for high tech gear.)

·      It can't be any worse than what we already have.

Lost in Words a Wicked and Delicious Take-down of Man Booker Prize

LOST IN WORDS

Edward St. Aubyn

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, # 978-037428091, 261 pp.

* * * *

Edward St. Aubyn was once short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s version of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Don’t look for his name again in the near future—not after his acidly funny thinly veiled take-down of the Man Booker in Lost for Words. His is a whistle-blower’s satire of the award, one that says the prize has less to do with literature than with boardrooms, bedrooms, horse-trading, and horseshit. It’s a work of fiction, but just barely. Former judge A. L. Kennedy called the Man Booker "a pile of crooked nonsense" awarded according to "who knows who, who's sleeping with who[m], who's selling drugs to who[m], who's married to who[m], whose turn it is." A look at past winners certainly gives pause. Amidst the distinguished—V.S. Naipul, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gortimer––one finds an awful lot of one-hit wonders and dross: Arundhati Roy, Anita Brookner, Kiran Desai… And I've yet to meet anyone who thinks that Hilary Mantel's novels are even readable, let alone worthy of winning two Man Bookers.  

Those who know British culture will have great fun matching the fictional characters vying for and judging the Elysian Prize to the real-life characters that inspired them. For example, one of the Elysian judges is a handsome young actor Tobias Benedict, a dead ringer for 2012 judge Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey). Other elements of Kennedy’s blast are also at play. The Man part of the Man Booker is the investment firm that administers the prize, as is the Elysian Prize corporate sponsor. Both prizes are often headed by politicians, Scottish MP Malcolm Craig in the case of Lost for Words. Other members of Craig's contentious committee include: Benedict; social media guru Jo Cross; Oxbridge scholar Vanessa Shaw; and Penny Feathers, the ex-mistress of both Craig and Sir David Hampshire, whose firm funds the award. Everybody has an agenda. Craig is partial to wot u starin at, a foul-mouthed look at Glasgow’s working-class underbelly; Cross seeks “relevance,” though what she means by that is anyone’s guess; Shaw wants stellar literature, though one suspects she doesn’t think any has been written since the Edwardian age; and Feathers––modeled after Dame Stella Rimington, another Booker apostate—just wants a good read and good luck with that. She’s also hysterically writing an execrable mystery of her own with the aid of software that helps choose words and phrases. As bad as that sounds, she comes close to being the sanest one of the lot! 

Add to this unruly lot the writers on the short list, those spurned, publishers, and hangers-on. Many of them circle like buzzards around the gorgeous Katherine Burns, a writer of some renown, though it's not clear if it's because she's really all that good, or if it's because she has no qualms with sleeping with whomever she finds useful. At one point she's simultaneously bedding her publisher, Alan Oaks; French rapscallion Didier Leroux; and novelist Sam Black. Oaks loses her affection when one of his aides mistakenly submits an Indian cookbook for the Elysian Prize instead of Burns' novel; and Black loses out to professional jealousy when his The Frozen Torrent makes the shortlist. Leroux claims Katherine, though he's a poor man's Foucault, a pseudo-intellectual happy to expound about all of the major points and many of the minor ones from his postmodern work of theory What is Banality? Poor man—he could answer that question by gazing into a mirror!

Lost for Words has its flaws. Like some of his characters, St. Aubyn occasionally goes over the top. It contains one worthless and ridiculous personality—solipsistic Indian aristocrat Sunny Bunjee who has come to England to claim a prize he knows he should win, though no one has heard of him or his self-published tome. He happens to be the nephew of the woman whose cookbook is mistakenly viewed as literature. We really don't need much of Sunny and St. Aubyn strolls into cheap satire when trying to flesh out Sunny's tale. And, yes, St. Aubyn is open to charges of cattiness. Still, his snippets of novels within the novel works well enough to show that the emperor has no clothes. I roared over how Vanessa Shaw defended All the World's a Stage, a really insipid tale narrated from William Shakespeare's point of view. If you've ever had the experience of picking up a Man Booker Prize winner and wondering why on earth it was even published, let alone honored, Lost for Words explains it all. At its best, this is a laugh-out-loud farce.   Rob Weir

Deck the Blah, Blah, Blah....

Here’s the blog post designed to get everyone’s dander up. I can’t help it—it’s December, my least favorite month of the year. It’s cold, the sun sets around 4:20, I’m too damn busy, viruses sprout like mistletoe, and I have to endure holiday music blaring from every speaker in the Western hemisphere. Anything but that! Nothing brings out the Grinch in me like December.

The Grinch before he went wrong!

Speaking of the Grinch, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is one of the saddest tales ever known. It makes me want to cry. It’s the tale of how a perfectly good monster lost his faith. The Grinch had a delightful curmudgeonly misanthropic thing going but by the end, he’s become a sniveling, sentimental fool. How sad it that? In my alt.Grinch, he gobbles Cindy Lou Who for breakfast and then pillages Whoville. It’s the only sane way to cope with the Christmas season.

Yep. I have issues—serious issues—with Christmas. First of all, it’s ahistorical. It’s 99:1 that Jesus was not born in December. (April is a better guess. The Bible tends to be circularly constructed, so odds are that Christmas and Easter are calendrically parallel.) Second, Christmas is a capitalist holiday, not a religious one. Actually, it’s become a communist one. Every time you go to Walmart, you are supporting its China, Inc. supply network, and everything you buy that says “Made in China” anywhere on the product, helps prop up the Reds of Beijing. About the only thing that amuses me in December is listening to conservatives defend the capitalist system, by which they mean the Red Chinese system. The same old crowd of phonies who’d pop a vein if they caught someone helping out Fidel Castro by smoking a Cuban cigar thinks that Wall Street and communism are antithetical. Hilarious!

I know that some Christians claim they spend the Yule season contemplating the Virgin birth and the coming of the Savior. Sure you do. When I drive by the mall, all I see being worshiped is the god of materialism. What I see very little of in the US of A is the daily practice of any major religion. My students associate Christianity with intolerance, bigotry, and an attempt to deny choice to individuals. Are they wrong? And, sorry, I don’t believe that Islam is a religion of peace. Hinduism is often an excuse for sexism and appalling levels of classicist privilege. I like the focus of secular Judaism, but its religious varieties are often knee-jerk defenses of whatever the State of Israel is doing, just as Anti-Semites automatically attack Israel and defend Palestinian terrorism. I’d take down Buddhism as well, though my main experience with it is via the catch phrases tossed out by decidedly Western Yoganistas. (Okay, the Buddhist Tamils have some things to answer for.)  My standard line these days is that I’m not anti-faith, I’m anti-organized religion. So add that to the list of why December is a thorn in my side as organized religions across the globe have hijacked it.  Rohatsu (Buddhist) happens in December, as does Hanukkah. Sometimes Diwali (Hindu) and any of a number of Muslim holidays occur in December. (It depends on whether their lunar calendars coincide with the Western Gregorian calendar.) Back in 1965, we invented Kwanzaa, a sort of pan-African religious/family/heritage celebration because there just weren’t enough religious holidays already. And, of course, there is the granddaddy of them all: Retail Day—sorry—Christmas.

I’d be happy to look the other way and merrily celebrate alternatives such as Moosemas and Festivus, but I can’t. Everywhere I turn it’s fa-la-la this and fa-la-la that. Neo-cons complain about the “War on Christmas,” but damned if I’ve noticed any massed troops seeking to overthrow it. Try not to hear Christmas carols this month. (Conveniently scheduling a one-month coma is the coward’s way out and doesn’t count.) Christmas season hurts my ears. Karaoke is the only thing that’s ever been done to music that is worse than Christmas music. “Jingle Bell Rock:” (a) doesn’t, (b) is as camp as a row of tents, and (c) makes me want to commit violence. Can it get any worse? Yes, I fear that it can. Bob Dylan made a holiday album. That alone is scarier than any slasher film you’ll ever see, but this year there’s a new collection of reggae ­and dub-step carols. I think my brain just melted!

Lord, help me make it through December! I am looking forward to the pagan holiday of Yule on December 21. That’s the Solstice for the uniformed. The days will gradually grow longer after Yule—seconds at a time at first, but in New England we’ll take it. Best of all, it means that December is nearly over!—S. A. Tire

Jeni and Billy's Big Picnic

JENI AND BILLY’S BIG PICNIC BAND

Picnic in the Sky

Waystation Records 003

* * * *

In the early days of the recording industry much of what we today call folk, country, and old-time music was called “hillbilly” music. That’s because the hills and hollows of Appalachia were a treasure trove raided by urbanized "song catchers" (academic collectors). Many of them mistakenly thought that all American folk songs and tunes were variants of British Isles imports. They soon learned that Appalachia was far more than music preserved in amber—the region also contained great original composers. And since those days, there have always been a number of women whose stars shined slightly brighter. In the (recorded) beginning there was Sarah (1898-1979) and Maybelle Carter (1909-1978) from Virginia. Slightly later those with recording machines came calling upon Kentuckians Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960) and her half sister Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910-1987). Still later we got Loretta Lynn (1932-) from Butcher Hollow, KY, June Carter (1929-2003) from Maces Spring, VA, and Jean Ritchie (1922-) from Viper, KY. So who are the heiresses to the Mountain Crown?

If you find yourself in a discussion doesn’t include Jeni Hankins of southwestern Virginia, walk away––it's not worth your time. Hankins' approach is often compared to that of Hazel Dickens (1925-2011) and aptly so. Though Hankins has a smoother, less nasal voice than Dickens, it has the same born-in-the-bone twang—the kind you don’t get by dressing up country and scouring songbooks. Hankins also grew up in the same contiguous coal mine region that spawned Dickens, and with the same sensibilities: an appreciation for the grace of ordinary people, mountain gospel music, support for miners’ unions, and a gift for finding beauty where less attuned people fail to see it.  Think I’m kidding about that last point? In “Good,” a song co-written with her musical partner Billy Kemp, the duo muse on coal mining, Sears Roebuck, Hardshell Baptists, and banjos. The banjo wins: “And he played us a tune from the old country/and the hills, they rang with our song/God said it was good/and we knew that it was good.” Even more impressive is “McHenry Street, a song inspired when the duo spotted kids making banners from trash can castoffs in Kemp’s native Baltimore. ”Picnic in the Sky is filled with small moments that seem more sublime when stripped of glitter and hype. This time the band is bigger—David Jackson (bass, accordion), Denny Weston, Jr. (percussion), Dillon O’Brian (keyboards, vocals), Dave Way (claps, feet), David Keenan (steel guitar), and Craig Eastman (fiddles, fretwork), an old acquaintance of mine whose work I’ve admired for decades. We get a veritable potpourri: “The Robin & the Banjo,” Jeni’s wedding song reworking of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’;” “The Old Hotel,” an illicit love song; the dust-and-tedium-meets-dreams “The Mill Hurries On;” and gospel refracted through Jane Eyre on “Reckoning Day.” Remember Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave?” Check out this album’s title track, a gentler shade of caustic with yellow squash and biscuits substituting for Hill’s pie, but the same hard questions about a future “heavenly reward.”  Call it “Good.” Call it authentic. Call me anytime Ms. Hankins is singing and Kemp is picking, flailing, and singing by her side. –Rob Weir

The Theory of Everything a Romantic Triumph: Color Me Surprised

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (2014)

Directed by James Marsh

Focus Features, PG-13, 123 minutes

* * * *

Let me start with a confession. Had I been in the producers’ room when writer Anthony McCarten pitched a script for a love story based on the life of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking I would have walked out muttering, “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” That’s one of the reasons I’m not a producer—that and the lack of tens of millions of dollars of gambling money.  A bit like the film’s protagonist, The Theory of Everything succeeds despite the odds against it. To add to its improbable triumph, the film is skillfully (if a bit straight forwardly) directed by James Marsh, whose previous credits consist mostly of made-for-TV films, documentaries, and the offbeat Wisconsin Death Trip (1999).

The story begins at Cambridge University in 1963, where the brash and carefree Hawking (Tom Prior for young Stephen, then Eddie Redmayne) is making his mark through a combination of bluster and brilliance, the latter mostly half-baked until structured by don and mentor Professor Dennis  Sciama (David Thewlis). Hawking is what you might expect of a physics geek—gawky, socially gauche, and prone to pretension. That begins to change when he meets future first wife Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) also brilliant, though a faithful Anglican studying Romance languages and literature. The sequence is chronological: courtship, early onset of ALS, marriage, care giving, family, fame, marital strain. By the time the Hawkings’ second (of three) children is born in 1970, their romance is unconventional to say the least. ALS is a horrendous degenerative disease that renders its victims increasingly unable to control basic motor functions such as walking, writing, speaking, or swallowing. Most stricken with ALS suffer their first symptoms when they are older than 50 and most pass within three years—remarkably, Hawking (72) has now lived with ALS for 50 years.

The Theory of Everything references Hawking’s desire to explain the beginning of the Universe. As such, the film touches upon his theories of singularity, black holes, radiation, and gravitational singularity. Hawking is renowned for his marriage of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. But don’t worry—you won’t need a Ph.D. in physics to get any of this. One of the film’s virtues is rendering complex scientific ideas in lay terms. Plus, the key to Hawking’s thought centers on how he factored time into his equations. Time, in fact, is an un-credited actor in this film. If the Big Bang created the Universe, the mechanics and mathematics of time suggest it will end much the same way. But this film is about the microcosm not the macro, and we watch as Stephen’s relationship with Jane moves more toward a final whimper, not a massive explosion even though the disintegrating impact of Stephen’s illness appears as an inevitable arc. In like fashion, Jane’s romance with good-hearted Jonathan Hellyer-Jones (Charlie Cox) and Stephen’s for caregiver (and second wife) Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake) unfold languidly in ways that parallel Hawking’s doubts about his earlier conclusions about the Big Bang. The film’s wonderful ending sequence similarly makes us rethink how time unfolds.

All of this is to say that The Theory of Everything is a romance, not a science film. At times you’ll wonder if the Universe is lubricated with schmaltz, but luckily these excesses are few in number. Mostly we muse upon the age-old question of what any of us would do for love, and the film certainly takes some of heroic/angelic luster from Hawking. His disease is to be pitied, but not his bouts of superciliousness, his egoism, or his horn-dog Hustler-induced love of pornography. The film is very well acted. Critics have, of course, praised Redmayne’s performance and he rightly deserves props for the sheer physicality of portraying a man who is losing his own. In my view, though, Ms. Jones gives a superior performance as she must convince us she is a simmering volcano that will not allow herself to explode. As in all British productions, all the secondary and minor characters are filled by skilled actors rather than shiny faces. Special praise goes to Thewlis, a much underappreciated actor, and to Cox, who plays the man-in-waiting to hangdog perfection.

Just so you know, this is another “based on a true story” tale that isn’t literally true. Jane, for instance, did not abandon her career to be Stephen’s nurse; she lived in London during the week, finished her Ph.D., and is now a professor. Nor did Hawking find his soul mate in Mason—the two quietly divorced in 2006. Take this film for what it is—a romance that, even when it goes over the top, makes us contemplate love as more than swelling music and unalloyed bliss. –Rob Weir