The Great Evolutionist Bares His Own Soul
“Creation” sets out to tell a rich and momentous story, culled from the pages of history and full of present-day topical resonance. In the wake of personal tragedy and in the throes of illness and apprehension, Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) organizes decades of thought and research into “On the Origin of Species.”
Not many books have been as consequential as “Origin of Species,” and Mr. Bettany’s Darwin, as imagined by the director Jon Amiel and the screenwriter John Collee, has more than an inkling of what the fallout will be. Religious authority will be challenged — some of Darwin’s allies, notably Thomas Huxley, froggily impersonated by Toby Jones, fancy that it will disappear altogether — and age-old assumptions about nature, human and otherwise, will be shattered. A great, civilizational drama looms, but what we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote, somewhat defensively, in reference to his theory of evolution by natural selection. There is certainly no shortage of grandiosity, which is not quite the same thing, in this film’s view of Darwin’s life.
You might suppose that Darwin’s great book was the product of patient, grinding labor, and while that might be the case, the filmmakers choose to convey the process of composition in the manner of a Gothic horror movie. Darwin writes with shaking hand and sweaty brow, as storms rattle his windows and his specimen jars glow with sinister import.
He is plagued by nightmares, and is also visited by the ghost of his beloved daughter Annie (Martha West), whose death at the age of 10 is the domestic tragedy around which the movie is constructed. The hallucinations of a haggard, more fully bald, middle-aged Darwin give way to memories of his younger, pinker, hairier self, as he enchants Annie with tales of zoological wonder and enlists her as his sounding board and intellectual ally.
Darwin’s wife, Emma, played by Jennifer Connelly (who is married to Mr. Bettany in real life too), is tolerant of her husband’s scientific zeal but worried about the state of his soul. She grasps the social and theological implications of his theories perhaps more fully than he does, and they exchange some lofty, heated words about God. A local clergyman (Jeremy Northam) comes around to serve as a foil for his neighbor and to incarnate both the benevolence and the obtuseness of religious custom.
“Creation,” while sympathetic to Darwin, is hardly a partisan culture-war document. It notes the erosion of its hero’s faith but hardly consigns faith to the dust bin of history. It aims for a liberal-minded balance, at least on the thematic level. But at the same time the film traffics in the pseudo-psychological mumbo-jumbo that is the standard folk religion of the film biography, and undermines its interest in reason by dabbling in emotive pop occultism. Recoiling from the possibility that ideas themselves might impart tension and interest to this tale, Mr. Amiel and Mr. Collee induce a kind of literary brain fever and reduce Darwin’s work to a symptom of his mental and emotional anguish.
Artistic creation and scientific discovery are irresistible subjects for filmmakers — is anything more alluring than the riddles of genius?— and “Creation” is only the latest example of how this admirable curiosity can fail. Mr. Bettany, so witty an embodiment of 19th-century scientific ambition in “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (also written by Mr. Collee) is far less persuasive here. His performance is overwrought even in its rare moments of repose, and in his spasms of grief or inspiration he behaves like someone’s idea of a Romantic poet at war with the world and in the grip of his muse.
And then there is that ghost. It is curious to note that Mr. Bettany, having played the imaginary friend of a great (and real) scientist in “A Beautiful Mind,” is now portraying a scientist with an imaginary friend of his own. This is only partly a coincidence: the prevalence of such devices suggests that commercial filmmakers don’t believe their audiences can comprehend science without the help of magical thinking.
“Creation,” which was based on a book by Randal Keynes, who is Darwin’s great-great-grandson, may well be a truthful portrait, but it is not a convincing or illuminating one. Its view of life is that a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, rather than being the product of either solitary genius or cultural ferment, amounts instead to a pretext and a substitute for therapy.
“Creation” is rated PG-13. Nature red in tooth and claw, and the death of a child.
CREATION
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jon Amiel; written by John Collee, based on a screen story by Mr. Amiel and Mr. Collee, based on the book “Annie’s Box” by Randal Keynes; director of photography, Jess Hall; edited by Melanie Oliver; music by Christopher Young; production designer, Laurence Dorman; produced by Jeremy Thomas; released by Newmarket Films. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Paul Bettany (Charles Darwin), Jennifer Connelly (Emma Darwin), Jeremy Northam (Reverend Innes), Toby Jones (Thomas Huxley), Benedict Cumberbatch (Joseph Hooker), Jim Carter (Parslow), Bill Paterson (Dr. Gully) and Martha West (Annie Darwin).
Not many books have been as consequential as “Origin of Species,” and Mr. Bettany’s Darwin, as imagined by the director Jon Amiel and the screenwriter John Collee, has more than an inkling of what the fallout will be. Religious authority will be challenged — some of Darwin’s allies, notably Thomas Huxley, froggily impersonated by Toby Jones, fancy that it will disappear altogether — and age-old assumptions about nature, human and otherwise, will be shattered. A great, civilizational drama looms, but what we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote, somewhat defensively, in reference to his theory of evolution by natural selection. There is certainly no shortage of grandiosity, which is not quite the same thing, in this film’s view of Darwin’s life.
You might suppose that Darwin’s great book was the product of patient, grinding labor, and while that might be the case, the filmmakers choose to convey the process of composition in the manner of a Gothic horror movie. Darwin writes with shaking hand and sweaty brow, as storms rattle his windows and his specimen jars glow with sinister import.
He is plagued by nightmares, and is also visited by the ghost of his beloved daughter Annie (Martha West), whose death at the age of 10 is the domestic tragedy around which the movie is constructed. The hallucinations of a haggard, more fully bald, middle-aged Darwin give way to memories of his younger, pinker, hairier self, as he enchants Annie with tales of zoological wonder and enlists her as his sounding board and intellectual ally.
Darwin’s wife, Emma, played by Jennifer Connelly (who is married to Mr. Bettany in real life too), is tolerant of her husband’s scientific zeal but worried about the state of his soul. She grasps the social and theological implications of his theories perhaps more fully than he does, and they exchange some lofty, heated words about God. A local clergyman (Jeremy Northam) comes around to serve as a foil for his neighbor and to incarnate both the benevolence and the obtuseness of religious custom.
“Creation,” while sympathetic to Darwin, is hardly a partisan culture-war document. It notes the erosion of its hero’s faith but hardly consigns faith to the dust bin of history. It aims for a liberal-minded balance, at least on the thematic level. But at the same time the film traffics in the pseudo-psychological mumbo-jumbo that is the standard folk religion of the film biography, and undermines its interest in reason by dabbling in emotive pop occultism. Recoiling from the possibility that ideas themselves might impart tension and interest to this tale, Mr. Amiel and Mr. Collee induce a kind of literary brain fever and reduce Darwin’s work to a symptom of his mental and emotional anguish.
Artistic creation and scientific discovery are irresistible subjects for filmmakers — is anything more alluring than the riddles of genius?— and “Creation” is only the latest example of how this admirable curiosity can fail. Mr. Bettany, so witty an embodiment of 19th-century scientific ambition in “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (also written by Mr. Collee) is far less persuasive here. His performance is overwrought even in its rare moments of repose, and in his spasms of grief or inspiration he behaves like someone’s idea of a Romantic poet at war with the world and in the grip of his muse.
And then there is that ghost. It is curious to note that Mr. Bettany, having played the imaginary friend of a great (and real) scientist in “A Beautiful Mind,” is now portraying a scientist with an imaginary friend of his own. This is only partly a coincidence: the prevalence of such devices suggests that commercial filmmakers don’t believe their audiences can comprehend science without the help of magical thinking.
“Creation,” which was based on a book by Randal Keynes, who is Darwin’s great-great-grandson, may well be a truthful portrait, but it is not a convincing or illuminating one. Its view of life is that a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, rather than being the product of either solitary genius or cultural ferment, amounts instead to a pretext and a substitute for therapy.
“Creation” is rated PG-13. Nature red in tooth and claw, and the death of a child.
CREATION
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jon Amiel; written by John Collee, based on a screen story by Mr. Amiel and Mr. Collee, based on the book “Annie’s Box” by Randal Keynes; director of photography, Jess Hall; edited by Melanie Oliver; music by Christopher Young; production designer, Laurence Dorman; produced by Jeremy Thomas; released by Newmarket Films. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Paul Bettany (Charles Darwin), Jennifer Connelly (Emma Darwin), Jeremy Northam (Reverend Innes), Toby Jones (Thomas Huxley), Benedict Cumberbatch (Joseph Hooker), Jim Carter (Parslow), Bill Paterson (Dr. Gully) and Martha West (Annie Darwin).
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