CREATION
Directed by Jon Amiel
Produced by Jeremy Thomas
Written by John Collee, based on a story by Amiel & Collee and the book Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes
Released by Newmarket Films
UK. 108 min. Rated PG-13
With Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jim Carter, Bill Paterson & Martha West 
 

Dramatizing intellectual endeavors is next to impossible, so one sympathizes with director Jon Amiel’s well-meaning if limp attempt to recount how a kindhearted British gentleman named Charles Darwin (played by Paul Bettany) came to write On the Origin of Species and change the modern world.

Partially based on a biography by the scientist’s great-great-grandson, Creation deals with Darwin’s writer’s block. Suffering from a probable neurotic illness (which he tries to cure with a bone-headed water treatment, the Reiki therapy of its day), Darwin is reluctant to continue his work for fear of offending his deeply religious wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly, also Bettany’s real-life spouse). But he can’t escape seeing nature as a godless, cruel machine—seen in effective documentary-style asides of foxes eating helpless rabbits, and one unfortunate abandoned nestling devoured in time-lapse photography by maggots. Darwin’s outlook further blackens after the death of his beloved young daughter, Annie (Martha West), who in the movie’s weakest scenes comes back to pester him as a ghostly hallucination.

If nothing else, the production is handsome and painterly, brimming with authentic period flavor. The shooting locations include Darwin’s actual home, Down House, and the often elegant script, by Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World scribe John Collee, features characters who speak with subordinate clauses and in complete sentences. The biopic, by and large, realizes a touching family drama, helped by solid performances—though Connelly struggles with her British accent—and a handful of inspired scenes. Darwin’s wordless friendship with an ill-fated orangutan, the first to reach a British zoo, transcends the gimmicky postcard moment—Darwin confronts man’s ancestor!—and becomes something genuine.

But Creation is more often didactic than deft. Too often conversations balloon into intellectual set pieces about religion and science as the film strives to make the inherently uncinematic and interior—thinking up and writing a book—into something that works on screen. It doesn’t, and the tricks the director resorts to, the dream sequences, the hallucinations, and the long scenes of Darwin arguing with his dead child’s ghost, quickly grow tiresome. Worse, Darwin’s psychology is too simple, too modern. The filmmakers cheapen the man and his achievement by making it seem the only obstacle that held him back from finishing his book sooner was having a good cry about his daughter.

Film is often a bad medium for ideas. And Creation bumps up against one of the real weaknesses of movies—characters with mistaken beliefs are not simply wrong-headed, they’re grotesque. A hissable clergyman, played by Jeremy Northam, forces Darwin’s daughter to kneel in salt for a few hours as punishment for believing in dinosaurs. And Thomas Huxley, a man who coined the word “agnostic,” is the victim of the film’s misguided attempt at ideological evenhandedness. He’s made out to be a sort of dwarfish, proto-Christopher Hitchens. His fanatic hatred of religion is ridiculous beside the guilty and mild-mannered naturalism of Charles Darwin. In the casting, the filmmakers really tip their hats, with the handsome, blond Bettany as the naturalist and the memorably odd-looking Toby Young as Huxley. Darwin’s hobbit, perhaps? Brendon Nafziger
January 22, 2010