Creation
Directed by Jon Amiel
Starring Paul Bettany & Jennifer Connelly
In cinemas
The life of Charles Darwin has all the elements of an engaging movie — adventure, conflict, insecurity, heartbreak and ultimately victory over entrenched ideas and institutions.
The film Creation takes up some of these issues, portraying Darwin (Paul Bettany) in the years preceding the publication of On the Origin of Species, grappling with his theory and confronting the religious conservatism of his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly).
And yet, director Jon Amiel seems to have found a way to make this story boring. Creation is not a terrible movie — Bettany and Connelly are both fine actors — but the story largely avoids the great conflicts posed by Darwin's ideas and focuses on his personal life. What's left is a gloomy and erratic drama.
Initially, the film uses a confusing timeline, moving back and forth through time with little indication of the date beyond Darwin's increasingly fragile hairline. Rather than helping us understand or appreciate the story, we're left confused and alienated.
There's also some hokey imagery, with Bettany's grief-ridden Darwin being pounded by a baptism of water during a hydrotherapy session and an even sillier image of him touching the finger of an orangutan.
Clearly meant as an allusion to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, it attempts to be sacrilegious, bittersweet (the animal is dying) and insightful into Darwin's theory all at the same time — clumsily failing at all three.
But the bigger problem is that the story focuses on Darwin's family life almost to the exclusion of his ideas or their challenge to society.
Darwin's theory was “the biggest single idea in the history of thought”, the opening titles tell us. But there are precious few examples of those ideas in the film.
There are a few discussions of evolution with fellow scientists, most notably with Thomas Huxley, later dubbed “Darwin's bulldog”, who congratulates him for killing God. “Good riddance to the old bugger”, Huxley says in a moment of greatly needed humor. There are also a few scenes involving Darwin's alienation from church, but altogether, these scenes are a sideshow.
Ultimately, Darwin's struggles are with his religious wife, although even that conflict was not so much about religion as it was about grief for their deceased child. There can be little doubt that this affected both of them deeply, but it's only one aspect of the pressures that Darwin faced and makes for a plodding story.
Instead of a brilliant scientist grappling with big ideas, we get a brooding, sickly madman barely able to put a word on the page, much less capable of revolutionising biology.
The result is very claustrophobic. For a film about a man who travelled the world and associated with some of the great scientific minds of his day, Creation spends far too much time with Darwin tucked away in his country home, with only an occasional visitor to bring him out of his doldrums.
More importantly, this completely avoids the larger conflicts that Darwin faced with the outside world and his own position in it.
Earlier in life, Darwin studied to become a clergyman at Cambridge, where students were required to swear to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in the Anglican Church, and most of the scholars were ordained priests. He later spent five years on the HMS Beagle, meticulously studying geology and wildlife along the way.
His observations convinced him of the evolution of species and led him to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin spent another 20 years of experimenting and studying in order to improve his theory and gather evidence for it.
The challenge these ideas posed and the potential they had to shake up the scientific community are almost nowhere to be seen in the film. Instead, this whirlwind of experience and ideas that led Darwin to his theory are left as footnotes to an overwrought chamber play.
[Abridged from US Socialist Worker www.socialistworker.org .]