Hawking

1963, Cambridge. Stephen Hawking is twenty one and has just started his doctorate; he has not yet decided what to work on. That year the diagnosis comes: a progressive disease affecting the motor nerves, and the doctors give him a few years. He stops working for a while. Then he turns to the question of the beginning of the universe. Two views were colliding in those years: the model saying the universe had always existed and the model saying it had a beginning. Hawking tries to build the mathematics of the second. Philip Martin directs. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Hawking. It was made for the BBC. The structure is double: real interviews with the researchers who found the cosmic background radiation are cut between the fictional sections. The narrative does not put the illness at the centre; the subject is how an idea gets built, and the illness is given as the condition of that work. Cumberbatch drew wide attention for the first time in this part and the production was nominated for television awards. The scientific matter it treats is the singularity, and the narrative describes it through argument rather than pictures. It is short and covers only a few years; Hawking's later career is outside the film. Who it is for: viewers who like drama from the history of science, and Cumberbatch. Who it is not for: the production is at television scale, the scientific content is shallow, and some characters are functional.