This movie is a major disappointment to me. I looked forward to it after listening to many of Richard Feynman's Physics lectures. While doing a great job of showing the love between these two people, it totally misses out on showing Richard as a person unto himself. He is so unique that this is a massive oversight, to say the least. Despite his tragedy, I am sure he was just as irreverent and humorous during the Manhattan project as he was for the rest of his life. Yet only a couple of snippets show this irreverence and humor and even those are done badly. One is the repetitive exiting of the Los Alamos site to demonstrate the lousy security they had despite rigorous examination of everyone entering the site. The other was when he first met with the students in the data processing lab. That one too was far below what I'm sure the real Richard Feynman would have done, judging by how he treated his students in almost all of the lectures I have listened to.
So Broderick took a whole person and cut him in half, only showing the intimate portion of his life and relationship with his wife that he loved so dearly. He almost completely left out the public persona of the man and this hurts the movie so badly that it never really recovers from it. It makes it a poor movie when it could have been a great movie, right up there with A Beautiful Mind. That is why I rated it a 3 instead of an 8 or 9 like it could have been.
So Broderick took a whole person and cut him in half, only showing the intimate portion of his life and relationship with his wife that he loved so dearly. He almost completely left out the public persona of the man and this hurts the movie so badly that it never really recovers from it. It makes it a poor movie when it could have been a great movie, right up there with A Beautiful Mind. That is why I rated it a 3 instead of an 8 or 9 like it could have been.