Creation - L'evoluzione di Darwin

Paul Bettany did a great role as the tortured father whose favorite little girl dies tragically of disease. For that, he deserves all the credit. However, the movie was mostly about exactly that, keeping the adventures of Darwin as he gathered data for his theories as incomplete stories told to children and skipping completely the disputes regarding his ideas.

Two things bothered me terribly: the soundtrack, with its whiny sound, practically shoving sadness down the throat of the viewer, and the movie trailer, showing some beautiful sceneries, the theological musings of him and his wife and the enthusiasm of his best friends as they prepare for a battle against blind faith, thus misrepresenting the movie completely.

To put it bluntly, if one were to remove the scenes of the movie trailer from the movie, the result would be a non descript family drama about a little child dying and the hardships of her parents as a result. Clearly, not what I expected from a movie about Darwin, albeit the movie was beautifully interpreted.

As you sit there, quietly evolving, spare a thought for Charles Darwin. He was more than the venerable man with beard you may remember from your schoolbooks. He had a wife and children, and spent much of the long hiatus between writing his big theory and actually publishing it, coping with his wife, beautiful Emma, who, if she looked at all like actress Jennifer Connelly, was beautiful, but not at all ready to give up on God. She was also having to deal with Darwin's all-consuming guilt over the fatal illness of his eldest daughter, for which he seemed to have believed he was responsible in at least one way.

This, Charles Darwin's homelife, is colourfully evoked in the slightly Gothic new film, Creation. As it opens with a flashback to a failed attempt to steal 'savage' children from a Pacific island and take them home to convert them into Good Christians, it has us on its side from the start; even more as it nods to Francois Truffaut's 'L'Enfant Sauvage'. Paul Bettany as the man himself is on-screen most of the time, like a contestant in the Channel Four 'big brother house' permanently in close-up. The way the story jumps backwards and forwards in time gives it the feeling of a ghost story too. And there are other pieces of Darwin's life we rarely get to think about, such as the relationship he built up with the female ape, stolen from her jungle family and living in solitary confinement in an English zoo until her death.

All in all, it's quite an emotional roller-coaster, although not at the expense of recreating the world of the late Victorians very convincingly.

Bettanny & Connelly beautifully act out this biopic on Charles Darwin. The movie focuses on Darwin's personal life and how it was effected by his scientific endeavours. I believe many viewers watched this movie with a pessimistic mindset (maybe brought on by their own religious beliefs). Some, I believe, were offended by any mention of evolution. However, this movie does not attempt to argue for or against religion in any way! Instead it centers around the inner battle of a brilliant man, who's ideas were revolutionary and scorned.

The movie gives a unique perspective into the life of Charles Darwin, and allows one to appreciate his works and convictions. This film is definitely worth seeing. The cinematography is well done, it is historically accurate, and the performances are sound.

For one who wants to understand the man behind the theories, it is great! But you must see it, optimistically, as a focus on the MAN and not his theories.

I saw this film on 19SEP2009 at the Cambridge Film Festival.

The Beagle's only in a couple of short flashbacks, the whole thing is about Darwin's life from 1841 to 1859, when he was ensconced in Kent with his growing family, 200+ pages of Origin had already been drafted and he was wondering whether to complete the book.

The script is based on Randal Keynes's book Annie's Box (Annie, Charles's daughter, died when she was 10). It is mostly a family drama, but does include sex scenes - however, the participants are married, both on and off screen. Not too exciting, not much science but a well-made film that's pleasant to watch and pushes the right emotional buttons. A bit of a romantic weepie, actually. I suppose the conclusion is that you can be an agnostic free-thinking scientist from an atheist family background and still be an emotional romantic as well as an excellent father.

Some of the characters and Darwin himself state or wonder whether he "killed god" but the viewer is able to doubt that. What is beyond doubt, given the deadly struggle for survival and the web of predation on the meadow-bank (well-known before Darwin and completely uncontroversial) and the failure of Darwin's prayers is that the idea of a kind, providential god who loves "his" creatures is untenable.

I really cannot see many Americans objecting to it very much. Some may have problems with the title, which is probably the most controversial thing about the film, or with the fact that Bettany does not have horns, a tail and a pitchfork.

CREATION is not a film about the development of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and if that is what the audience expects it will be disappointed. What this little film presents instead is the midlife crisis (the film takes place in 1858-59 and Darwin was born in 1809, having completed his 1840 'Voyage of the Beagle' after the famous time he spent from 1831 -36 on the HMS Beagle as a naturalist gathering data) when Darwin had made his observations of nature and natural survival of the fittest and was struggling with writing of 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection', a book that would threaten to incise his relationship not only with Christian society but also with his fervently religious wife Emma. It is a story of the tortured man coping with the dichotomy between science and religion, between a man obsessed with his scientific discoveries while longing to be a good father to the children he loved. Yes there is discussion of his scientific theories, made mostly in his stories he told his children, but the book on which it is based, Randal Keynes 'Annie's Box' (Keynes is the great great grandson of Darwin) - a book of diaries and quiet notes about the Darwin and his oldest daughter Annie whose death as a young girl nearly destroyed Darwin - is more concerned with opening the windows to the family life of the great scientist than expounding the scientific theory we all know so well. John Collee's screenplay serves the film well as does the careful direction of Jon Amiel.

Charles Darwin's presence is illuminated by Paul Bettany's performance and the difficult role of his wife Emma is played with great sensitivity by Bettany's real wife Jennifer Connelly. The pivotal role of Annie (Darwin's eldest daughter who seemed to have inherited all of the curiosity and imagination of Darwin) is portrayed by first time actress Martha West (daughter of actor Dominic West): it is Annie's death that alters the course of this story, that event and the final reconciliation between Darwin and Emma after Emma actually reads the completed book (The Origin of Species). The supporting cast is excellent: Jeremy Northam is the unforgiving cleric Reverend Innes, the other Darwin children are very natural in their acting - Freya Parks, Harrison Sansostri, Christopher Dunkin - and Toby Jones adds sparks as Thomas Huxley who declares that Darwin's theories prove that God is dead! The cinematography by Jess Hall is excellent - especially in the scenes involving man's first connection with the apes. The musical score by Christopher Young rather blurs all the action into a Victorian mush, but the actors and director are able to make us forget that ill- conceived add-on. In all, the film is a family story - it just so happens that the family is that of a great man about whose personal life we know very little. Impressive work.

Grady Harp