A small story with epic reach

 

  Director Clint Bentley takes on author Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, a 166-page novel that deals with large themes about the destruction of the American West, the trials of one tormented man, and his inability to make sense of tragic loss. 

  Perhaps to make Johnson's authorial voice part of the movie, Bentley makes heavy use of a narrator (Will Patton). Never intrusive, Patton's voice guides us through the story of Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a sturdy resident of the Pacific Northwest who ekes out a living as a logger.

   Logging takes Robert away from his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and his infant daughter. He'd rather stay home, but money is scarce, and so are jobs.

   From the start, it's clear that Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso will celebrate the beauty of Northeast Washington, where the movie was filmed. Never purely decorative; the landscape and its trees have a near-hallowed quality. 

   For a time, Robert and Gladys live in a Western Eden, two people and a child in a small cabin Robert builds. All they want is to be together and live.

   Of course, there's no story in "just living." On a logging expedition, Robert becomes complicit in the death of a Chinese worker, hurled off a bridge by bigots who accuse the man of stealing. From that point on, Robert believes he's cursed. The events that follow suggest that he might be right.

    Principal among such catastrophes is a massive forest fire that consumes Robert's home, taking the lives of his wife and child. Robert was on his way home from a logging expedition when he saw smoke clouding the sky. He arrived too late to save his wife and daughter.

     Even in the early going, Bentley breaks the movie's bucolic moods with shots of trains sparking and roaring through the landscape. A recurrent train dream slices into Robert's sleep, an engine of destruction.

    The perils of logging come into sharper focus when Robert gathers around campfires with fellow loggers. These rough-hewn men include Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider) and Arn Peebles (William H. Macy). The men acknowledge the danger of their work: A falling branch can take its revenge on those who swing the axes. 

    Some of Robert's dreams evoke memories of his cherished domestic life.  Robert and his daughter share beautifully tender moments, and when Robert and Gladys are together, their love bubbles with laughter.

     A bearded Edgerton gives a solid performance as a man who, throughout most of the movie, knows little peace, but who also knows how to bear his troubles. He's a man of limited knowledge, but Edgerton suggests depths Robert can't quite grasp.

     Late in the film, Robert meets Claire (Kerry Condon), a widow who works as a lookout for forest fires. She lives in a tower that affords an overview of the territory Robert only has seen in pieces, and she expresses a deep and moving sympathy for Robert's plight. 

      The movie covers Robert's life from around 1917 to 1968. The scenes in the '60s struck me as  jarring, perhaps intentionally so. Robert's best days were lived before the frontier vanished. Still, there's a mood-breaking awkwardness to the these scenes I found difficult to digest.

      I also wondered what the film would have been had Bentley (Jockey, Sing Sing), working from a screenplay he wrote with Greg Kwedar, eliminated the narration and let Robert's journey grow and flow on its own. 

     Still, as I've said, Paton's narration can be viewed as part of the film's fabric, helping Bentley to play a trick that gives the movie its poignance: He takes a subject of epic scope and tells it in small strokes that mark the life of a man who'll never see how his life fits into the big picture. But, then, who among us ever will?

     

       

An architect's fight for integrity

   Few filmmakers -- Paul Thomas Anderson may be one -- make movies that seem to live and breathe in worlds of their own. The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet's three-hour and 15-minute foray into the life of a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect qualifies as such a movie. Like the architectural style for which it's named, The Brutalist can be raw and abrasive, a story blanched of sentiment.

   A movie as ambitious as The Brutalist puts a tremendous burden on the actor (Adrien Brody) who'll play architect László Toth, a refugee who arrives in the US in 1947 after being separated from his wife (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece (Raffey Cassidy).

    Stuck in an immigration limbo, Toth's wife and niece still languish in Europe, but Toth perseveres in the face of a displacement the movie makes clear with his arrival in New York City. A cockeyed shot of the Statue of Liberty signals that neither Toth nor we have reached a mythic land of liberty and justice. 

     But Toth’s not arriving in the America of historical realism, either. He lands in the world Corbet and his co-writer,  Mona Fastvoid, create, a world full of striving and duplicity, as well as opportunities for reinvention. 

     The movie, which shows with a 15-minute intermission, divides into two acts and an epilogue that allow Corbet steadily to open thematic doors. Among them:  capitalism’s inevitable perversion of art, the fierce individuality needed to protect artistic integrity, and the abiding agony of surviving events that never can be left behind. 

       Early on, Toth moves in with a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who lives in Pennsylvania with his American wife (Emma Laird). Nivola's Attila seems to have shed his Old Country past, even converting to Catholicism. Toth designs furniture for the shop Attila owns, a dim connection to his previous life but still a creative endeavor.

     The story shifts gears when the cheerfully opportunistic Attila puts Laszlo in touch with Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of a wealthy tycoon (Guy Pearce). Harry wants to surprise his father by renovating the library where Dad houses his rare book collection.

   Laszlo makes the library into a design-oriented space that takes the rarity of the books into account. He designs shelves that turn to shield the books from the sun. 

    When he arrives home, Pearce's character -- an infuriated Harrison Lee Van Buren — tosses Laszlo and Attila out of his home. He hates the library, which, for him, has one only purpose: to  display his taste and purported erudition. 

    A reporter for Look magazine discovers the library and proclaims it as the masterwork of a genius whose career was disrupted by war and the Holocaust. Van Buren recants. He pays Laszlo for his work, and invites him to design a community-oriented art and spiritual center for the suburban town of Doylestown, Pa.

    The plot's density increases. Laszlo moves into quarters on Van Buren's estate. His wife and niece return to him. He continues a heroin addiction that began as a way to cope with an injury, and his relationship with Van Buren wobbles, leading to a jarring and metaphorically strained act of sexual violence during a trip the men make to Carrara to select marble for the chapel's altar. 

    I’m not sure that The Brutalist makes groundbreaking statements about art, America, or the incorporation of new populations into the American tapestry. Toth’s Judaism remains, but isn't deeply explored. Corbet introduces a Black character (Isaach De Bankole) who becomes part of Toth's orbit, but whose story proves minimal.

      Limitations aside, Corbet's characters are among the year's most vividly realized and distinctive, offering Brody, Pearce, and Jones opportunities for  major performances. Together, director and cast create moments that prove provocative, fresh, and artfully imagined. 

       You may remember the movie as if it were dream, not entirely graspable but notable for its lingering power.

   

Midnight Sky falls short of noble goals

   I wish Midnight Sky had been able to live up to its lofty ambitions. As star and director, George Clooney aims big, constructing a variety of impressive set pieces, including a terrific spacewalk sequence and scenes that unfold in the middle of a blinding arctic storm.

  Despite reaching such visual heights, the movie falls short of achieving the semi-mournful, vaguely hopeful impact for which it's apparently striving. Midnight Sky is serious, steadfast but seldom grand.

   Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist working at a deserted facility in the Arctic Circle. The year: 2049.

    Augustine, who's suffering from terminal cancer, decided to remain in the Arctic after the rest of his co-workers departed. An   unspecified global disaster has doomed the Earth's entire human population.

   At the same time, a manned-mission to one of Jupiter's moons is working its way back toward Earth, having scouted the place as a possible alternative residence for humanity. Augustine has taken on the task of delivering a devastating message: The crew is returning to a doomed planet. He thinks they should head back to Jupiter.

   The movie divides between action on the ship (the exterior has been beautifully designed) and Augustine's efforts to reach it — with a few flashbacks inserted to give a hint of Augustine's character and to allow him to be played by an actor (Ethan Peck) who looks nothing like a younger Clooney.

    Augustine, we learn, has devoted his life to science at the expense of maintaining important family connections.

    While roaming in his Arctic observatory, Augustine discovers a girl (Caoilinn Springall)  about age seven. The evacuating team somehow left her behind. 

   Resigned to his lonely solitude, Augustine doesn't know how to care for the girl, a task made more difficult because she doesn't talk.

    Slowly, he develops a relationship with her, which means he has to take her with him when he begins a cross-ice trek to reach a radio transmitter at a weather station located away from his home base.

    The onboard crew of the spaceship Aether includes David Oyelowo as the captain and Felicity Jones as a crew member we soon learn is pregnant. Jones's Sully and Oyelowo’s character developed a relationship during the flight, which includes other  less intriguing astronauts played by Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir, and Kyle Chandler

    Transitions between Earth and space don’t always feel fluid and I wondered whether the obvious physical difficulties of the shoot had blinded the filmmakers to the movie’s narrative insufficiencies and thinly developed characters.

   Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, Midnight Sky hobbles itself with weighty themes. The possible extinction of the human race might be as weighty as themes get — at least for those of us who belong to it. But Midnight Sky yields to mild attenuation, offering hope with an ending (which if you think about it) raises a ton of questions.

   I won't say more. Midnight Sky generated no animosity on my part, just a sense that the movie resembled a space voyage that didn’t carry enough fuel to penetrate the existential questions it tries to probe.

Up, up and away -- some of the time

Aeronauts reunites Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones for an adventure that's fine so long as it doesn't touch the ground.

After their joint appearance in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones reunite for a story about a scientist who enlists the help of a balloonist with a flair for show business.

Based on a real character, Redmayne's James Glaisher hopes to convince Britain's rigid scientific establishment that meteorology should be accepted as a legitimate scientific pursuit. In the 19th Century, predicting the weather evidently was not considered possible.

Director Tom Harper's movie begins when Jones' Amelia Wren arrives late for the balloon launch that's aiming to break the height record for balloon ascendance.

Harper immediately sketches personality details for each member of his adventurous duo. Amelia is the daring one; Redmayne's James takes a more cerebral approach to balloon flight. He's less interested in thrilling the gathered crowd than in collecting atmospheric data.

Amelia understands the importance of grand gestures. To make sure that the onlookers are adequately thrilled, she throws her cute little dog off the rising balloon. The crowd gasps. Not to worry. The dog is attached to a parachute.

Amelia, by the way, is a fictional stand-in for Glashier's real partner, Henry Coxwell. Perhaps to give the movie some feminist charge, Amelia disregards the advice of Antonia (Phoebe Fox), the sister who thinks Amelia should stay home and tend to domestic matters.

Amelia's backstory also involves the guilt she feels about her late husband's demise. Vincent Perez plays Amelia's husband, also a balloonist, in one of the movie's many awkward flashbacks.

None of this provides viewers with much reason to see The Aeronauts. But audiences may wish to seek out this adventure because of its aerial sequences, one of which -- a true stunner -- arrives when Amelia must climb to the top of the balloon to deal with a failure that needs to be righted before the balloon can descend.

At a height of 35,000 feet, both Amelia and James are in danger of freezing to death.

There isn't much else to say about the Aeronauts. One might summarize this way: Balloon footage (good); the rest (meh).

One note: If you haven't seen Harper's Wild Rose, the story of an aspiring country singer from Scotland, you ought to give it a look. It was released earlier this year.

RBG, champion of gender equality

On the Basis of Sex can't match RBG, a widely seen documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps because it opts to follow standard bio-pic moves.

If you want some insight into Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you'd do better to watch the recent documentary RBG than to immerse yourself in the dramatized account of Ginsburg's pre-Supreme Court life provided by On the Basis of Sex, a movie that makes no bones about lauding Ginsburg for being a groundbreaker against gender discrimination.

I'm not saying that Ginsburg doesn't deserve such accolades; I am saying that I wish the movie had delivered them in less routine ways.

Still, the value of On the Basis of Sex lies in its overall thrust; the movie reminds us that it wasn't all that long ago that even the most accomplished women had difficulty advancing within the legal establishment -- not to mention the society at large.

And, yes, I know that despite progress, gender equality remains an on-going battle.

Can we buy Felicity Jones as Ginsburg? I guess, but the documentary RBG proved that Ginsburg made a better Ginsburg than Jones, and as directed by Mimi Leder, the movie quickly becomes a catalog of the insulting ways professional women were treated during the late 50s and early '60s.

Working from a script by Daniel Stiepleman, Leder begins the story when Ginsburg enters Harvard Law School, an institution that in 1956 still harbored gender bias: The dean of the law school (Sam Waterston) believes a coveted place at prestigious Harvard Law could be better utilized by a bread-winning man.

At Harvard, Ginsburg received unwavering support from her husband, Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer), a genial man who also was enrolled in Harvard Law and who never underestimated his wife's brilliance.

Ginsburg quickly emerges as a super-woman who can take care of a newborn, tend to her ailing husband when he's diagnosed with testicular cancer and excel as a student -- not only in her classes but when filling in for the recovering Martin.

Ginsburg ultimately transferred to Columbia University's law school because Martin landed a job in New York. After graduation, she found that most of the major Manhattan law firms had no interest in hiring a woman.

As a result, Ginsburg began teaching at the law school of Rutgers University in Newark. She and Martin eventually came across a case that opened a door to tackling gender discrimination. Ironically, it involved a male.

The movie spends a good deal of time on litigation involving Charles E. Moritz (Chris Mulkey), a Colorado man who had been denied a tax deduction for taking care of his ill mother on the grounds that caregiving roles were restricted to women.

Martin became involved because he was a highly regarded tax attorney with tons of court-room experience. But as the proceedings unfolded, Ruth Ginsburg found her legal voice. She took charge of gender elements in Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

You'll learn a lot about this 1972 challenge of a tax-court ruling: how it was chosen, the various legal arguments it generated and why it connects to broader gender discrimination cases.

Leder also devotes time to Ginsburg's relationship with her daughter Jane (Cailee Spaeny), a young woman whose views about institutional gender bias were more advanced than her mother's. Initially, Jane was skeptical about her mother's insistence that an unfair system could be changed from the inside.

Justin Theroux signs on as an ACLU lawyer who's eventually cajoled into allowing the organization to join forces with the Ginsburgs.

On the Basis of Sex never transcends by-the-book filmmaking. It's an okay big-screen bio that exemplifies what happens when a movie has an important story to tell but could have told it in a more compelling fashion.

A postscript: There are movies and then there's real life. Every follower of news knows that Justice Ginsberg recently was operated on for lung cancer. If RBG and On the Basis of Sex provide even a glimpse of Ginsburg's fortitude, it's difficult to imagine that she won't be around if someone decides to make a movie about the second half of her career.

A monster calls, a boy listens

A 12-year-old struggles with the looming death of his mother.

Few movies deal with what happens when a child must confront the death of a loved one. Fair to say, then, that A Monster Calls musters considerable courage in taking on a difficult subject by telling the story of Conor (Lewis MacDougall), a 12-year-old boy who's losing his mother (Felicity Jones) to cancer.

Adapted from a YA novel by Patrick Ness, who based his story on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, another YA novelist who really did die of cancer, A Monster Calls plumbs young Conor's imagination by introducing him to a tree monster (voiced by Liam Neeson) who guides the boy through what may turn out to be the worst period of his life.

The monster follows a tough love approach, reinforced by Neeson's fine voice performance. The monster doesn't coddle Conor, but informs him that he'll be told three stories (beautifully animated set pieces within the movie) before learning the most important truth pertaining to his situation.

Conor isn't entirely captivated by the stories, which the monster concludes with some observations that probably are too directly expressed: People occupy various places on the moral spectrum at various times; few are entirely good or irredeemably bad; sometimes bad deeds have positive outcomes.

Aside from his mother's condition, Conor has other worries. He's bullied at school, and he dreads the prospect of living with his stern grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) after his mother dies. Conor's dad (Toby Kebbell) has moved to America, and has started a new family.

Director J.A. Bayona does a fine job mixing the movie's live action, animation and effects-driven scenes, so much so that the movie's somber mood may remind you of something that another Spanish director (Guillermo del Toro) might have rendered -- albeit in even more ominous fashion.

The performances are all good; it's particularly refreshing that MacDougall isn't a generically cute movie kid.

It's also touching that Conor and his mom are soulmates in the world of the imagination. Both have artistic inclinations. Perhaps that's how Conor learned to use his imagination both to cope with and escape from a situation he doesn't want to face.

I could go on, but let me say the most important thing: The movie put a lump in my throat, even as I wondered whether adults will want to see what can be construed as a kids' movie -- even if it really isn't a kids' movie of standard-issue variety. It's possible that A Monster Calls is more a movie about a kid than a movie for kids, particularly younger ones.

And some of the scenes may challenge parents to do some explaining, notably one in which a furious Conor destroys his grandmother's living room, an instance in which Conor vents his darker impulses.

Despite such cautions, Bayona and company have managed to make a movie that doesn't shrink from a difficult subject. Good for them -- and good for those viewers willing to give it a try.

After all, it's worth remembering that not everything that happens in childhood qualifies as kid stuff.

War? What's it good for? A 'Star Wars' movie that pits rebels against the Death Star

Rogue One may stand alone, but it doesn't stand above the best Star Wars movies.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place at a time when The Empire, imperial source of all evil, is in the process of constructing a Death Star, a weapon so powerful it can destroy entire planets.

As familiar as that may sound, Rogue One turns out to be a slightly different kind of Star Wars adventure. Production notes for the movie describe it as a stand-alone effort -- albeit one that's meant to fit into the Star Wars universe.

Led by director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Monsters), the Disney team takes us on a less-than-epic tour of a darkly hued Star Wars world. We meet a ragtag group of rebels that fights the massive Empire, but the movie mostly takes the twinkle out of Star Wars' eyes, opting instead for a battle-heavy extravaganza with stunt-and-grunt impact.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a young woman whose father was a scientist who tried to hide from the Empire but later was captured and forced to work on the Death Star. When the movie opens, Jyn and her father (Mads Mikkelsen) are living in isolation on a remote planet.

Troops from the Empire swoop in, kill Jyn's mom and take Dad prisoner. Jyn escapes, and grows into a young woman who's recruited by rebels.

Cinematographer Grieg Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher) seems to prefer dark imagery that often obscures the actors, which isn't altogether bad considering that Jones's performance feels a bit muted. She's the latest version of a female protagonist who can handle herself -- and others.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) leads the rebel mission which is supposed to locate Jyn's father. Neither Cassian nor Jyn initially wants anything to do with the other; it's not providing anything by way of spoilers to say that their relationship evolves -- although it doesn't ignite much by way of sparks.

The other characters include Chirrut (Donnie Yen), a blind monk who knows how to use The Force. Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) serves as Chirrut's less well-kempt pal.

Other characters include the morally ambivalent Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), and K-2SO, a long-armed droid voiced by Alan Tudyk with 3-CPO intonations. K-2SO comes closest to giving the movie a big of comic spin. It tells you something about this massive enterprise that the character with the most humor is a droid.

The opening of the movie does a bit of confusing planet hopping, before explaining the role that's being played by an oxygen-snorting character portrayed by Forest Whitaker.

You'll also see brief appearances from Darth Vader, but the evil Empire mostly falls under the leadership of Krennic, who appears in a white cape and is played by the always menacing Ben Mendelsohn.

Alien creatures also appear, but this time, few are played for laughs.

I always get a bit lost in Star Wars jargon, so forgive me if I'm wrong in saying the planet Jedha is where much of the movie's explosive urban warfare takes place. A climactic battle is set on Scarif, a planet with beaches and palm trees that give the movie a war-in-the-Pacific flavor.

By the end, Edwards pretty much turns Rogue One into an action blur (on the ground and in space), an interminable battle in which, among other things, space ships and space stations ram into one another with brute force, but without much by way of the rousing thrills.

References to predecessor movies let us know that we are, indeed, in the Star Wars universe, and Rogue One definitely benefits from the association. I'm not sure how it would fare as separate hunk of sci-fi. Probably not so well.

Edwards evidently wanted a bit of war-movie verisimilitude to characterize this journey into the Star Wars universe. That doesn't mean there's no zap and pow to the battles, but it makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have had a memory lapse. Isn't Star Wars supposed to be a fantasy -- telling but still a fantasy?

Oh well, the Star Wars canon is vast, and more movies are planned. But for all its huffing and puffing, this one only intermittently feels like a full-blown helping of deep-space fun.

One thing you can bet on: Devotees don't much care what critics think and will spend lots of time hashing this one out among themselves. If you've grown past that point in your life, I wouldn't say Rogue One, though hardly a bad movie, offers sufficient reason not to get on with other business.

Seeking the truth behind a murder

James Franco and Jonah Hill get serious in True Story.

In True Story, Jonah Hill and James Franco put on serious faces to tell a story about journalistic ethics and murder. But before we get to how well they do, some background may be helpful.

True Story is the big-screen adaptation of Michael Finkel's 2005 book, True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa. Let's begin with the "Mea Culpa" of Finkel's title.

Finkel's journalistic career hit a major snag when he was fired for fudging facts in a New York times magazine cover story about the use of slave labor on African cocoa plantations.

In search of a more compelling read, Finkel created a composite character without telling readers that he was combining the stories of a variety of young men who'd been terribly exploited.

Months after his New York Times debacle, Finkel learned that an Oregon man who had been arrested for murdering his wife and three children had been posing as Finkel while hiding from the law in Mexico.

Seeing a path to possible journalistic redemption and a book contract, Finkel visited Longo in jail, wondering why the accused murderer had tried to steal his identity.

Simple, Longo told him, he very much admired Finkel's writing. He was an ardent fan.

Finkel developed a relationship with Longo, who proceeded to tell him his story, claiming that he was innocent. But he also refused to tell Finkel what really happened, asking instead that Finkel teach him how to write.

For his part, Finkel thought he was a good enough reporter to induce Longo to spill whatever beans need spilling.

Although not without interest, the resultant movie never fully realizes the mind-bending possibilities that result when a journalist (Hill) whose work has come under question meets a prisoner (Franco) whose account of events immediately qualifies as suspect. Facing the death penalty if convicted, Longo had plenty of reason to lie.

British theater director Rupert Goold directs in competent but conventional fashion as he presents the story of a writer (with an agenda, of course) who collaborated with a prisoner (with an agenda of his own).

Hill and Franco worked together in the comedy This is the End, but are paired here in a dramatic effort that's sprinkled with brief flashbacks to the crime.

Franco brings low-key calm to the role of an accused murderer, as well as a bit of rumpled charm.

We know that Hill can act (see Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street), but I couldn't quite buy him as an avid, ambitious and ultimately desperate reporter, perhaps because the script makes Finkel too much of a one-note character. Having screwed up, he now wants to restart his career.

Almost everything that transpires between Finkel and Longo in the pivotal jail scenes clings to the surface; their one-on-one exchanges lack the kind of subtext that would have given the movie's ethical issues more dimension.

The screenplay by Goold and David Kajganich tells us that Longo's a horrible narcissist, but doesn't really dig into his personality. Half the time, the movie doesn't even seem interested in whether Longo actually committed the crime.

Felicity Jones appears as Finkel's wife, but doesn't have much to do other than pop up for a jail house visit with Longo, delivered with more conviction than anything else in the movie.

And that's the rub here. Goold's movie says many of the right things, but doesn't always dramatize them in compelling ways. The fact that both men are acting out roles should have resulted in a dizzying look at how men in high-pressure situations are called upon to create themselves. Besides, we needed to know more about both these guys.

True Story is a decent enough movie, but it should (and could) have been brilliant.

A marriage full of challenges

Redmayne and Jones are terrific in this mature look at the marriage between Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde.

The Theory of Everything -- a look at the 26-year marriage between physicist Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde -- is based on Wilde's book, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.

I begin there because those expecting a movie along the lines of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time or a visual companion piece to any of Hawking's many bestsellers, probably will be disappointed.

Although the movie has taken the title of one of Hawking's books, it has less to do with theoretical physics than with a very untheoretical marriage that lasted quite a long time. Wilde knew that Hawking had contracted ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) before she insisted on tying the knot.

When Wilde married Hawking in the 1960s, he had been given only a few years to live. He's now 72.

Director James Marsh (Man on Wire) makes a choice that opens his movie to a wider audience than those obsessed with cosmology.

Perhaps Marsh assumed, quite justifiably, that those who are deeply interested in questions such as whether time had a beginning would know where to look for more information. Hawking, by the way, changed his mind about that question during the course of his work.

Admittedly, The Theory of Everything might have been more interesting if Marsh had given us a bit more insight into Hawking's work, but the movie earns its stripes as an intriguing look at a difficult marriage, and it makes no attempt to canonize either Hawking or Wilde.

They remain human beings dealing with adversity, and if you bypass The Theory of Everything, you'll miss two of the year's finest performances: from Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife.

We meet Hawking at Cambridge in 1963. He's the kind of annoyingly bright graduate student who easily impresses his professor (David Thewlis) by breezing through problems that drive other students crazy.

Redmayne gives a physically demanding performance that must have become more taxing the more he was called upon to mimic the disease that deformed Hawking's body, put him in a wheel chair and eventually took his voice.

Hawking speaks with a computer-generated voice that, by now, has become familiar to those who've seen him -- and who hasn't?

Redmayne not only captures Hawking's physical disabilities, he infuses his performance with intelligence and wit. A half-smile that may result from disease also serves as a kind of metaphor for a situation in which Hawking seems to realize that biology has dealt him an absurd hand.

Jones' performance is every bit as good. When we meet her, she's a young woman studying medieval Spanish literature. Unlike Hawking, she believes in God. It's almost as if she intends to will her marriage to succeed.

As the story unfolds, Jane's decency never wavers, but she also begins to feel the inevitable resentments of a woman whose sacrifices have been doubled: She's a caretaker both for Hawking and for the couple's three children.

Unlike most of us who are prone to complaint, Jane has earned her frustration.

When Jane joins a church choir, she meets choir master Jonathan (Charlie Cox), an incredibly understanding fellow who becomes part of the Hawking family. Increasingly, he provides Jane with much needed emotional support and, ultimately, with love.

Marsh takes a non-judgmental approach to both Hawking and Jane, allowing them to be themselves without the intervention of an authorial voice to tell us where they're doing well and where they may have gone wrong.

So, yes, I'd have preferred a little more science and a good deal more stylistic daring to match the boldness of Hawking's thought, but The Theory of Everything deserves credit for taking a mature look at the evolution of a most unusual marriage between two most unusual people.

And the mysteries of marriage, as even the dimmest of us must know, remain resistant to scientific analysis.

Charles Dickens has an affair

Ralph Fiennes acts in and directs The Invisible Woman.

The most compelling reason to see The Invisible Woman -- a look at a long-running affair between author Charles Dickens and actress Nelly Ternan -- has less to do with the lure of illicit romance than with Ralph Fiennes' engaging portrayal of Dickens, an author of abundant talent, indefatigable energy and dazzling complexity.

In what might be his must spirited performance ever, Fiennes (who also directed) reminds us that Dickens was a self-dramatizing celebrity with an enviable capacity for work. Not only did Dickens write his often lengthy novels, he directed plays, acted, spoke frequently at public gatherings, fathered 10 children and conducted a busy, extracurricular personal life.

When Fiennes reads Dickens' prose to the author's adoring fans, he makes it clear that Dickens keenly understands the drama in his own work. In fact, drama -- sometimes even melodrama -- might be the most important thing to Dickens, both in his writing and in his private life.

The movie's title suggests that Ternan (Felicity Jones) was forced to subordinate herself to the demands of the great man's image. The 45-year-old Dickens was married when he met Ternan, who was 18 at the time of their first encounter. Dickens discovered Ternan while he was directing and acting in an amateur production in Manchester.

According to the movie, Dickens eventually separated from his wife, but never publicly acknowledged his 13-year relationship with Ternan, a woman who (in the movie's view) understood and appreciated him in ways that his staid, portly and mostly resigned spouse (a fine Joanna Scanlan) never could.

In one of the movie's best scenes, Scanlan's Catherine gently concedes the race to Dickens' heart, but warns Ternan that no woman ever will be as important to the great man as his adoring and voracious public.

Working from a script by Abi Morgan -- who adapted a book by Claire Tomalin -- Fiennes alternates between Ternan's life as a married school teacher and her youthful days with Dickens. The structure emphasizes the fact that Ternan -- often seen taking brisk walks on a lonely Margate beach -- is struggling with her past.

Jones tempers youthful enthusiasm with growing unease. Ternan, we learn, is a mediocre actress whose mother (a fine Kristen Scott Thomas) takes on a difficult task: She angles to advance her daughter's prospects while also protecting her.

At one point, Dickens' friend and fellow author Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander) tries to convince Nelly that she's duty bound to break with convention and accept the role of perpetual mistress. Men, Nelly says, can afford to be sexual pioneers: Victorian women can't.

Toward the end of the movie, Nelly has a conversation with a sympathetic cleric (John Kavanagh), and the movie proceeds to a redemptive finale. Nelly apparently has digested her past, and is ready to move on.

Fiennes has directed before (Coriolanus), but I'm not sure that he's mastered the art of being on both sides of the camera. In The Invisible Woman, his work in front of the camera surpasses what he achieves behind it, despite able assistance from cinematographer Rob Hardy and production designer Maria Djurkovic, who team to create a finely detailed 19th Century environment.

For all of its achievements, The Invisible Woman seems a small potatoes drama, a minor and sometimes sluggish portrait of Victorian womanhood into which the character of Dickens breathes most of the movie's life. I can't know Fiennes intentions, but I find it difficult to believe that's what he had in mind.

'Hysteria': The vibe isn't good

Hysteria tries to take a breezy approach to a 19th Century story about the dawn of a new consciousness in female sexuality. Put more succinctly, Hysteria is a comedy about the invention of the vibrator. Director Tanya Wexler pokes fun at the Victorian propensity to put a mask of acceptability on physical pleasure. To make the point, the movie includes a variety of brief scenes in which a strait-laced physician brings various women to climax by providing manual stimulation. As it turns out, such physicians, who perform their work with detached precision, experience an unfortunate occupational hazard. Call it hand fatigue. For them, the vibrator is a godsend. Hugh Dancy plays Mortimer Granville, a doctor who lands a job working for Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), a physician who specializes in the aforementioned hand therapy. Dalrymple introduces electricity into the proceedings after he discerns another use for an electric feather duster his roommate (Rupert Everett) has invented. No story can run on vibrators alone, so Pryce's character has been given two daughters (Felciity Jones and Maggie Gyllenhaal). As it turns out, Gyllenhaal's cheerfully independent character operates a settlement house for impoverished women. The screenplay introduces a bit of romantic rivalry involving Dancy and the two daughters, but it doesn't amount to much. I read somewhere -- can't remember where or I'd happily credit the source -- that Hysteria is supposed to play like Masterpiece Theater with vibrators. It's a nice description -- and I wish it actually were true. Such a movie might have been funner, cheekier and more satirically relevant.