The media and public fascination with Stephen Hawking has, it seems to me, always been driven by a mixture of infantilising sentimentalism and morbid curiosity.
His work is not even dimly understood by most people outside the scientific world - the record shows how many copies of A Brief History
of Time have been sold, not read - so we cheer from the metaphorical sidelines not for what he has done but because he did it while in the savage grip of motor neurone disease.
Since everyone knows the disease has dimmed his intellectual faculties not a bit, such admiration seems faintly condescending. So it is little wonder that scientists have bristled at the way Hawking's work is treated in this film: the anachronistic use of the term "black holes"; the idea that one of his biggest breakthroughs was sparked by staring into a coal fire.
The implication of his thinking - that three-dimensional space may be an illusion - doesn't get a look-in, but his attitude to whether we can disprove the need for God becomes a running gag.
All this is forgivable, of course: it's a movie, after all, and people don't go to the movies to grapple with quantum theory. But there's a promise in its title that is not so much broken as entirely ignored. The film, written by UK-based New Zealander Anthony McCarten, and based on the memoir of Hawking's first wife, is a domestic romance, really, a brief history of their time together, not a portrait of the scientist.
