The Theory of Everything does Jane Hawking a disservice Early in the glossy new Oscar-bait film The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne's Stephen Hawking takes Felicity Jones's Jane Wilde on a first date to his parents" house. The invitation seems a whim, the Hawking family happy and full of in-jokes, like something out of a Salinger novel. Hawking shyly asks Jones to the May ball at Cambridge. And there he remarks on the phosphorescence of clothing detergent, initially refuses to dance, then concedes finally to a slow waltz and a kiss, on a beautifully lit bridge outdoors. This is all very romantic. It also mostly never happened. There was a May ball, a conversation about Tide, and a little dancing. But the lunch is fiction and in fact, so is the bridge, the kiss and the manner of the invitation. The Theory of Everything's marketing materials will tell you it is based on Jane Hawking's memoir of her marriage, a book published in the UK as Music to Move the Stars and then reissued as Travelling to Infinity. But the screenwriter's gone and rearranged the facts to suit certain dramatic conventions. And while that always happens in these based-on-a-true-story films, the scale of the departure in The Theory of Everything is unusually wide. The film becomes almost dishonest - in a way that feels unfair to both parties, and oddly, particularly Jane Hawking herself. That invitation, for example: in the film it is presented as a joyous occasion before the diagnosis. Yet Jane Hawking records it actually coming over the telephone, and in fact by that time she already knew Stephen had a degenerative motor neuron disease. And their arrival at the ball happens by way of a terrifying car ride, because apparently Hawking was an incautious driver, with a lead foot on the pedal and a mind elsewhere. Jane remarks, "He probably felt that he could afford to live dangerously since fate had already dealt him such a cruel blow." In fact she's frightened enough to not want to drive home with him, although she enjoys herself well enough. In another of the film's pivotal scenes, one replicated in the trailers as a sort of thesis statement for the character, Jones's Jane says to Stephen's father, "I know what you all think, that I do not seem like a very strong person. But we are going to fight this disease together. If that sounds a little pat to you, it does to me too. This scene never appears in the memoir, and in fact Jane Hawking says she never got any comments from her friends or family at all. She describes the first year after the engagement as filled with "euphoria." The memoir, in short, reveals a much more complex courtship than the film captures, and a newlywed bliss much less self-conscious about the weight it would come to assume. While obviously no film could precisely replicate the inside experience of a marriage, it feels like the film-makers didn't even try. They simply made up another. This is a shame because the memoir shows you that there was much deeper dramatic intrigue here. Women of Jane Hawking's generation and type are a puzzle to my own. They seem so content to abandon personal ambition in pop culture representations like The Theory of Everything. And I cringed while reading that when Stephen proposed, Jane writes, she "consigned all my thoughts of a career in the diplomatic service to oblivion." And that is more or less where the film leaves the balance of power between Stephen's and Jane's careers. But as I read on I learned that Jane continued to teach French and Spanish. And she minded when Hawking would belittle her work, a belief he apparently even articulated to the man who supervised her undergraduate thesis. She observed of other physicists" wives that "they were already, to all intents and purposes, widows - physics widows." While not precisely a feminist, she writes that she knew early on that just being a wife and mother was "a one-way ticket to outer darkness, and that it was essential to preserve my own identity." The movie gestures towards Jane's own intellectual ambitions but mostly collapses her individualist spirit into her love of Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a choir director who became involved with the family. He and Jane Hawking are now married, though it's not clear their love affair came about as summarily as it is presented in the film either. It's a confusing choice because it seems to miss the truly intriguing bit of the marriage: preserving yourself in the face of marriage vows. Women still feel the tug of a nurturing ideal that on the surface Jane Hawking represents. She took on this genius husband, who came with a sort of "you'll live in his shadow" guarantee. He also had a degenerative disease and his care stretched out decades longer than expected. But instead of exploring that fascinating texture in a marriage, The Theory of Everything is hell-bent on preserving the cliche: it tells you that Jane Hawking quietly and gratefully parted ways with him when it became clear their affection for each other was a casualty of the strain. The movie presents the demise of their relationship as a beautiful, tear-soaked, mutually respectful conversation. Of course that didn't actually happen either. Jane's book describes a protracted breakup that comes to a head in a screaming fight on vacation. She also described devastation when Hawking announced by letter he was leaving her for his second wife, Elaine Mason. He ended up married to Mason for 10 years before that fell apart and then he and Jane mended fences. Which, as it happens, the movie fudges too. It tries to present the rapprochement as coming when Hawking was made a Companion of Honour in 1989, but that actually happened before the couple separated. I suppose the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten, thought he was making the most of such a dramatic occasion. But I wish he'd stopped and imagined, just for a second, what it might be like to be facing Her Majesty with 20 years" worth of much more complicated emotions roiling inside you.