Jan 28, 2014 3 min read

“Hawking” is a brief film history of a man who has defied both the odds of his own survival and a few mysteries of the universe.

Stephen Hawking, who turned 72 this month, is so much the most famous physicist in the world, it’s not an exaggeration to say he’s achieved rock star status.

“Hawking,” filmed last year and airing at 10 p.m. today on PBS, is an autobiographical film, with contributions from family members, including his former wife, Jane, and his elder sister, Mary, as well as fellow scientists.

This wouldn’t be a PBS documentary if actual content weren’t squeezed to accommodate a couple of nonacademic celebrities: Benedict Cumberbatch offers insight into how he portrayed Hawking in a film, but Jim Carrey wastes precious moments in the hour-long film that could have been better utilized.

We do hear Hawking’s story in his own words, but not his own voice, of course. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) while at Oxford University, lost the use of his hands to the motor neuron disease in the mid-’70s and lost the ability to speak after a near-death bout of pneumonia necessitated the implantation of a ventilator through a tracheotomy.

Ever since, we have heard Hawking as the computerized voice of his communication system. It’s an interesting voice, almost Scandinavian at times, but while it is largely a monotone, the ends of his sentences tend to descend a half-step. The result is a vague suggestion of resignation in his voice. You are especially aware of it when he says things like, “Every new day could be my last.” And: “I’m totally reliant on those around me. Seventy-one years ago, my life began that way too.”

Make that, “acceptance,” because if there’s one thing we can’t help taking away from Stephen Finnigan’s film, it is that human beings are far more adaptable than we think we are. When faced with limited or no options, Hawking has not only accepted and adapted, he’s triumphed.

Hawking’s undergraduate career at Oxford was rather lackluster. It was considered unseemly for students to work too hard, and though exceptionally clever, Hawking was all for having a good time and doing minimal work. The ALS diagnosis brought him up short. Facing the likelihood of death within just a couple of years, he at first became rather a “tragic character,” his sister recalls. He began listening obsessively to the music of Richard Wagner as he pursued his doctorate at Cambridge.

Falling in love with Jane Wilde, who became his first wife, sparked greater devotion to work in Hawking, who was determined to prove that the universe was created through the Big Bang theory. He did so by building on work done on black holes by Sir Roger Penrose.

Finnigan’s film does a superb job helping us understand the basics of complicated scientific theories, much as Hawking himself has done through his public appearances and through his book “A Brief History of Time.” Hawking not only wanted to popularize science but to do so with a book that would be a best-seller in airport gift shops. No one else believed the book would ever be that when it was published in 1988, but it more than surpassed even its author’s hopes. The book set a record of occupying a spot on the best seller list for four years and to date has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.