"A Brief History of Time" (1991)

                                   My knowledge of Steven Hawking is often been through media depictions of the man. The only dramatic depiction of Stephen Hawking that I can think of is The Theory of Everything, a dull Hallmark movie that somehow got a theatrical release (and they somehow casted a freckled eight-year-old in the lead role). I guess his life is ripe for any prestige movie produced by Focus Features. In 2014, Criterion reissued the oft-forgotten docu-adaptation of Hawking's hugely popular science book, A Brief History of Time.
                                   A Brief History of Time is both a semi-adaptation of Hawking's best-selling science book of the same name (I get the feeling the movie barely scratches the surface of Hawking's theories) and a biographical account of his life and his struggles with ALS. It was also directed by Errol Morris, the documentarian behind the exceptional The Thin Blue Line, and the strange Gates of Heaven (a documentary about pet cemeteries that Roger Ebert contended was one of the greatest films ever made).
                             For the most part, it's decent and cuddly enough for a documentary that was more of an afterthought than anyone's passion project. The film rights were bought by some producer and it just sort of floated around until they went to Morris to tackle the subject (this was shortly after the success of The Thin Blue Line). It's an odd directorial choice for such sentimental subject matter (Morris called this his most romantic film) since his films up to that point were either quirky slices of life or searing condemnations of injustice.
                            I've always admired Morris' unobtrusive style. He lets the subjects tell the story without the aid of voice-overs or any sort of graphic telling the audience what's going on or who the interviewee is. It takes a strange amount of confidence and he does it remarkably well. The movie utilizes animation to explain the science which goes hand in hand nicely with Hawking's way of using pictures/pictograms to communicate his theories to the world. I sort of enjoyed the subjects that were interviewed, like Hawking's sister, who seemed to nervously chuckle after every sentence, or Hawking's foppish friends. For the most part, it's just o-kay.
                             However, I couldn't really make heads or tails of what Morris' ultimate goal was here. I mean, the juxtaposition of the macro (Hawking's cosmological theories) and the micro (Hawking's life) is an admirable technique but it felt awkwardly blended. The scientific aspects were interesting but Hawking's story isn't all that interesting. And since Morris' documentaries tend to be more probing, this doc felt a little too polite and modest to fully engage with me.

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