Weeknight Viewing

James Marsh, "The Theory of Everything" (2014); Todd Haynes, "Dark Water" (2019)

No Consumer Guide this week because—quaintly, I know—my Yamaha CD changer stopped working and I’m no longer certain my Sony backup ever started. And although I couldn’t do my work without Spotify I find it both clumsy and incomplete. After checking a lot of connections and manhandling the jammed CD tray I decided to stop being a klutz and seek advice on YouTube, where I learned that fixing a jammed tray requires skills involving gears and the like that I am highly unlikely to master before I die. (P.S. I didn’t need YouTube to figure out that CD changers are painfully clumsy and heavy for an 82‑year‑old man to cart over to Best Buy for recycling.)

A new Onkyo changer I don’t like that much either arrived from Amazon Tuesday, but by then deadlines impended. So instead of Consumer Guiding I thought I’d briefly recommend two films that have not so much brightened two recent weeknights as consumed them: Theory of Everything, an  Oscar‑winning 2014 biopic of the crippled cosmological genius Stephen Hawking directed by James Marsh, and Dark Waters, an all too obscure 2019 quasi‑verite expose/docudrama about chemical pollution directed by Todd Haynes, renowned in the music world for films about Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and Karen Carpenter.

Theory of Everything is an exceedingly well‑written film even more remarkable for its visuals, in particular Oscar‑winning Eddie Redmayne’s ever‑evolving turn as Hawking. He begins as a gawky undergraduate of unmistakable brilliance and near‑comic physical ineptitude who at 21 deteriorates into an arresting yet somehow charming grotesque whose severely limited ability to do any of the things most humans can with their bodies becomes more eloquent and even attractive as he applies his undaunted determination and immense intelligence to the many difficult details of how he is to disport himself for what he’s told is a mere two remaining years of life due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fortunately, his variant proves exceptionally slow‑moving, and thanks to his powerful will and one‑of‑a‑kind intellect as well as the support of the woman who marries him and the colleagues who know they’ll never encounter another mind like his, he lives till he’s 76. Plotwise this is all engrossing enough, but what keeps you watching is Redmayne’s performance. It’s like a world‑class acrobat in reverse or a one‑of‑a‑kind ballet dancer—aesthetic pleasure you enjoy for its own sake while admiring and struggling to comprehend the complexity of the content. Yes, there’s a plot, a powerful and perplexing one. Yet Redmayne very nearly transcends it.

The Todd Haynes film Dark Waters is a different kind of movie, blunt and matter-of-fact and there to make a distressing point. Set mostly in eastern Ohio, it’s essentially an expose, where due to an accident of family ties protagonist Robert Bilott, an Ohio lawyer played by Marc Ruffalo, visits a West Virginia farmer who wants to know why his cattle are dying. The answer is chemical giant DuPont’s hottest product, teflon, which contains a carcinogenic carbon derivative. Visually the film is the obverse of Theory of Everything; the farmer (played, as it happens, by an aging Juilliard graduate), looks something like an old shoe, and even Bilott, a role the good‑looking Ruffalo gained 30 pounds to make his own, is plain and worn, albeit not as much as the countless file boxes stuffed with teflon documentation DuPont dumps in his office, which is my favorite image in the movie. Only when Bilott’s bosses, who include at least one Taft, invite him to a company dinner do many pretty people surface. My second‑favorite shot depicts Bilott with what looks like the same once‑stuffed boxes almost empty—he’s read it all. The wear and tear the case puts on his family life and his own health are other unsexy details. But the ending is happy enough and the entire film powerful, distressing, and educational. Not everyone can be the world’s greatest cosmologist.