Création

The British film, Creation, finally showed up in Sacramento. I'd been looking forward to it for some time as being a BBC product, I know the script would be well written and with the competent Paul Bettany and lovely Jennifer Connelly as CR and Emma Darwin, I knew that alone would be worth the price of admission for 2 seniors.

The storyline pretends to focus on the preparation of CR's writing On the Origin. I'd known that, of course, not from just being a Darwin addict but also from reading the reviews in the New Yorker, Time and New York Review of Books. Visually, the film is delightful with splendid costuming and recapturing visual scenes of those times. The story largely unfolds in at the Darwin house in Down with some spot flashbacks. The supporting cast is likewise superb with Jeremy Northam as the local Vicar, Innes, Toby Jones as Huxley and Ben Cumberbatch as Hooker. So, I walked in and prepared to be delighted.

However, what unfolds is a hodge-podge of romantic speculation surrounding the death of Annie Darwin, which portrays her as a ghostly manifestation of CR's alter Ego, drawn out on a canvas of his misgivings about promulgating his ideas on natural selection. There is some excellent repartee presented on the gentle but firm coaxing by Hooker and aggressive and feisty prodding by Huxley, but behind it, you the portrayed ideological misgivings of Emma who is presented as much more fundamentalist in her views than the recorded biographies of the Darwins afford.

The Wedgewoods and Darwins were hardly that docternaire. Indeed, they were Unitarians, Whigs and outspoken abolitionists. Old Joshua Wedgewood and Erasmus Darwin, CR and Emma's common grandfathers, were active supporters of the abolitionist, William Wilberforce, Soapy Sam's father. So, for the serious Darwin history buff, there's a rub.

However, what follows is a presentation as CR as kind of schizophrenic John Nash who pursues his ghostly alter ego manifestation, his dead daughter, Annie, into a final confrontation with his own grief.

OK. We're not seeing documentary, I remind myself, we're seeing fictional biopic. So, we can let that part go. However, the scene where CR gives his ms of the On the Origin, to Emma and then the discretion to read or burn, stretches the point out proportion in my view.

Other points: little is made by CR's receiving Wallace's letter and paper on Natural Selection. Bettany's CR merely gives a somewhat cynical grin, dismissing this startling news with a "Gosh. I didn't need this ..." attitude. Lyell, alas, is completely written out of the script to give the Rev. Innes more screen time to press the point of a religious conflict that, according to received wisdom and well documented historical evidence, CR had long resolved in his own mind.

So, all and all: As an anthropologist and live-long Darwin scholar and fan, I'd give Creation a B- on the academic side based on what I perceive as a distortion of the relevant facts and evidence but certainly an A- on the quality of BBC historical drama. There's no doubt in the any of the biographers' works on CR that he and Emma were devastated by Annie's death by either typhus or diphtheria. However, to present the life and conflict of a man dedicated to the scientific method within a mystical light and framework, I found to be most discomforting.

Of all the greatest men in science, Charles Darwin stands taller than most. His superior intellectual searching and inevitably, his persistent exercise in evolutionary logic, gave mankind the tools with which to eventually determine the Origins of Man. In point of fact, this film, ably directed by Jon Ameil, is called " Creation " and answers the eternal question for all open-minded students, teachers and inquisitive scientists alike. Moreover, the poignant film also endeavors to unveil a portion of the private life behind the real Darwin. (Paul Bettany) Darwin himself was not only a practical man, but a deeply sensitive father and husband. Herein audiences discover that throughout his life and during his subsequent marriage to his cousin Emma, (Jennifer Connelly) Charles pays dearly for his revolutionary ideas. The story touches his association with Captain Fitzroy (Ian Kelly), Joseph Hooker ( Benedict Cumberbatch) and his most ardent supporter Thomas Huxley ( Toby Jones). However, it also reveals just how deeply he loved his children, especially his favorite daughter Annie. (Martha West) All in all, the movie is exceptional and for audiences of every age, a Classic story. Highly recommended. ****

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.

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

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.