SXSW Film Reviews: 'Hawking'

Hawking

It takes an extraordinary film to capture the extraordinary life of renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who literally embodies the human condition: shackled to the earth, dreaming of the stars. Director Finnigan has accomplished that film. Hawking's unmistakable digitized voice narrates this simultaneously expansive and intimate story of a truly remarkable life and body of work, from his childhood with freethinking parents, through his desultory academic beginnings at Oxford, and finally to an assured place in the pantheon of the greatest scientific minds of all time. Remarkably, his disabling ALS helped trigger and sustain an ambition to pursue his best work, and he continues to transform human knowledge of the universe and the sense of our place in it. Hawking has also led a surprisingly active and complicated personal life for one so physically constricted; in the long run, as he hopes, he'll be remembered not for his cruel disabilities, but his stunning discoveries.