It seems there are certain roles that would win any actor an Oscar, though that’s not entirely true: consider the formidable names who have played Nelson Mandela, for example, and somehow missed the gold. Yet it’s fair to say that Eddie Redmayne could probably have been a lot less convincing as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking than he is in The Theory of Everything (Universal, 12), and still have walked off with most of the prizes. If there’s one thing that impresses award voters more than the effort that goes into mimicking a disability, it’s the effort that goes into mimicking a very, very famous person.
Cynicism, however, should not get in the way of admiration, and Redmayne really does make a remarkable Hawking. His performance may painstakingly convey the progressive physical contortions and restrictions of motor neurone disease, but it’s not a purely technical feat: there’s life behind the eyes here, an empathetic sense of Hawking’s wit and sensitivity alongside his feverish genius.
Much the same goes for the film itself, which may colour inside the lines of the prestige biopic template, but not without style or flashes of beauty. Director James Marsh, bringing to proceedings the studious intelligence of his documentary work, opts occasionally for startling visual saturation and distortion, reflecting his subject’s singular window on the world. And as Hawking’s dedicated first wife Jane, Felicity Jones demonstrates enough heartsore individual gumption to turn this potential one-man hagiography into a nuanced, human pas de deux; the film may not live up to its lofty title, but it’s not without ideas.
Not as many, admittedly, as Nymphomaniac: The Director’s Cut (Artificial Eye, 18), Lars von Trier’s vital, raucously unruly examination of human sexuality – or, at least, what passes for human sexuality on the perversely analytical, liberally aroused planet of Trier. On its first DVD release a year ago, the film already took more pungent, cohesive form than it did in its two-part cinema release; now, clocking in at a massive 352 minutes, the extended version doesn’t offer an expanded perspective so much as an intensified one.
One new sequence in particular – gruellingly gazing at Charlotte Gainsbourg’s protagonist as she performs a kitchen-floor abortion on herself – unlocks a significant portion of the film’s tougher rhetoric. It’s an appreciably different film for such additions, though not one that will make many new friends.
Making a welcome debut on Netflix this week is Beyond Clueless, a woozily ambient cine-essay by British critic-turned-film-maker Charlie Lyne that takes as its subject the American teen movies of his own childhood – which is to say, as a clue to Lyne’s youth, 1995 onwards. Drawing from the cult canon and the straight-to-video shelf alike, and composed entirely of intricately spliced fragments from its selection, the film unpicks the sexual politics of the movies under scrutiny without relocating them to a real-world adolescent context. That opacity will enervate many viewers, as will its strict but unexplained chronological parameters; John Hughes acolytes aren’t served here. But it’s a sleekly constructed curio; questionable in a constructive sense of the word.
