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Dir: Jon Amiel.
Cast: Paul Bettany, Jeremy Northam, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Jennifer Connelly, Jim Carter
Description: A biopic of Charles Darwin, focusing on one of the most turbulent periods in the scientist's life, when grief has estranged him from his wife Emma and his children. Adding to his woes, Charles finds himself at the centre of a tug of war between science and faith. The embattled father finds his salvation in 10-year-old daughter Annie, who inspires him to complete his manuscript to On The Origin Of Species.
Country: UK. 2009. 108mins
My family and other animals: Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin with wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly)
One of the things that makes cinema so compelling and so infuriating is that life is never enough for it. Even the most dramatic life must be heightened. This is true of very good movies as well as mediocre ones. For example, Jesus Christ had rather a vivid time of it during his 33 years, what with escaping Herod as a baby and performing miracles and dying for our sins. But in King of Kings, one of his biopics, he also has to be very good-looking and accompanied down the road by heavenly choirs.
Similarly, William Randolph Hearst was no slacker in the human-interest department: he developed a media empire, had a Hollywood actress as his long-term mistress and controlled public opinion. Yet in Citizen Kane his alter ego, Charles Foster Kane, finds that his whole life has been determined by a missing toy. The real life wasn’t enough: we needed the emotional bassoons of a five-act opera.
Charles Darwin had what might be described as a not-very-boring life. He went around the world on HMS Beagle, he had a lot of children, he collected many small insects, fossils and pieces of bone, and — oh, yes — he discovered the principle of evolution, the connection between animal species; he opened up the truth of natural selection and the fact of the struggle of living things to survive on Earth.
His discoveries changed for ever the way life was understood and the way creatures were classified, presenting a challenge to ancient myths, religions and beliefs about creation. He was also said to be a dab hand in the garden. But is this enough for the makers of Creation?
Living in a quiet Kent village, Darwin (Paul Bettany) and his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) are not having a very happy time of it. He is in his early forties and appears to be a bit preoccupied with work and other matters. I won’t say exactly what the other matters are but let’s just say he spends a lot of time retreating to his study and getting feverish. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Darwin is in a terrible quandary: his researches have led him to understand that the Biblical account of creation cannot be literally true. Life was not invented in a day — or six days — but over millions of years and man is related to other creatures. This causes a bit of a long-term domestic with the wife, who is a committed Christian and feels that the publication of his discoveries will be horrifying for everybody. Darwin therefore holds up his work and finds himself to be in agony.
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The film, directed by Jon Amiel, works by going between this point of crisis, when his daughter Annie (who dies at the age of 10) appears to be his only comfort, and the period of his first discoveries among the beasts and plants. It flashes back and forward quite merrily, and you feel involved and excited by the material he is uncovering. Bettany is very touching as Darwin, both humanising a great thinker and bringing an intelligent empathy to the part. In one excellent scene, we see him playing with a primate at the zoo, noting the animal’s rather human responses to things. It is good shorthand and Bettany reveals something of Darwin’s almost childish sense of wonder when confronted with the sophistication of living things.
Back on the home front, though, Emma gathers her brows like a gathering storm, proving both a goad and a conscience to Darwin at the point of his great contribution. Jennifer Connelly is always quite brooding and also quite soulful: you want to believe in her pain, even when, as here, it seems manufactured. The story begins to snag on your tolerance, especially if you know the more complicated story of Emma Darwin and know of her love and support of her husband through those years. In Creation, Darwin seems an isolated figure — not only from Emma but from his colleagues in the scientific community — and there is something soap-operatic in the ranging of forces against the central character in this way. The other scientists, played wittily by Toby Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch, are forced into the roles of goodies and baddies as suits the plot.
It is not enough to say “it wasn’t like this” — films are seldom like their source material and they have no requirement to be, if they are good films. The problem with Creation is that it too often swaps original life for clichéd fiction. It is the old problem: life is not enough for the creators of Creation, and they resort, too often, to standard clichés of genius and mourning. The Darwins did have a hard time of it, and writing On the Origin of Species was undoubtedly a struggle on many fronts, but do we really have to pin that struggle down to an overwhelming experience of grief? Must it be tied to black hostility from his wife, and the sort of psychosomatic illnesses that routinely accompany depictions of genius in the movies?
The film is beautifully shot and there are dreamy sequences that convey, better than anything I’ve seen or read, the fantastical, creative quality of Darwin’s mind. There are scenes of mental disorientation that work but many of them immediately recall a previous Bettany film, A Beautiful Mind, about another highly creative thinker who paid a personal price for his brilliance. Some of the best elements in Creation are to do with costume, lighting and set design: you really feel the tones of the period, with subtlety and proportion given to all things in a way that can make the film lovely.
I imagine it might have worked better as a story if the narrative had proceeded from that subtlety and proportion, and perhaps not by enslaving the Darwins to some Gothic endurance test.
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The problem is, Darwin did struggle that mightily with his grief, and he did have that psychosomatic illness, and his wife was that upset at him...they're not really overdramatzing it, that stuff really was a part of his life. Now he didn't literally see his daughter's ghost, but the fillmmakers have said that this was not supposed to be literal but more symbolic. We'll see.
- Lia, London, UK
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