In an Oscar race like this one, we all win.
Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything
Focus Features
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game
Weinstein Company
Like a pair of overachieving rival siblings with fetching English accents, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything have been set on a path to compete for audience affection and awards season attention this fall. The two movies, which played at the Toronto International Film Festival, both depict true stories of British geniuses whose work has been hugely influential and whose lives are marked by great adversity — one-two punches of success and tragedy.
Both The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything are also directed by filmmakers with hip pedigrees — the former by Morten Tyldum of the Norwegian art-theft thriller Headhunters, and the latter by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for doc Man on Wire. And they're both handsome productions starring handsome U.K. actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne, in the sort of roles that have Oscar written all over them, which is not so much a compliment as much as an indication of genre.
Fortunately, you needn't pick only one (unless you're an Academy voter), and which you like better may depend on how you like your biopics. By that mark, The Theory of Everything has the edge, thanks to the way it approaches its subject, physicist Stephen Hawking, through the arc of his marriage to his first wife Jane (a terrific Felicity Jones), from whose memoir Anthony McCarten adapted the screenplay. It's a journey of the heart centered on someone who tends to be regarded as an exceptional mind in a failing body, famed for his scientific achievement and the ALS that gradually robbed him of the ability to control his muscles.
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