The new Charles Darwin picture could have been more intelligently designed. There has never been a definitive feature film about the naturalist who rocked the fundamentals of Western thought with his theory of evolution. Unfortunately, with the release today of “Creation,” there still hasn’t been one.
Director Jon Amiel (“Entrapment”) and his screenwriter John Collee have based their competently executed but narrowly focused biopic on the book “Annie’s Box,” recently retitled “Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin,” written by Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes. However “true” it may be, the filmmakers choose to concentrate the story on the protagonist as a physically frail, grief-stricken and professionally conflicted older family man, portrayed with presence if not much excitement by Paul Bettany.
If you go
‘Creation’
2 out of 5 Stars
Stars: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam
Director: Jon Amiel
Rated PG-13 for some intense thematic material
Running time: 108 minutes
Though some flashbacks dabble briefly in his discoveries, the movie leaves out what we want to know most about the monumental figure, still controversial over two centuries later in some quarters, who transformed forever the relationship between science and religion. There is no back story concerning why and how this particular person grew up to be Charles Darwin, how he came to figure out natural selection, and what happened in the outside world as word of his ideas was first received. Instead, the very insular narrative unfolds almost entirely at Darwin’s home as his favorite child, his young daughter Annie (Martha West), falls deathly ill and begins to haunt him as a ghost. The script suggests that it was Annie’s fate that finally compelled Darwin to write down his discoveries in the legendary tome “On the Origin of Species” (1859) after spending some 20 years developing his data and then procrastinating to publish it.
Apparently, Darwin was reluctant partly because he knew the shocking effect his work would have on a society organized around religious belief. But he also didn’t want to alienate his beloved wife, Emma, a devout Christian, played by actor Bettany’s dour real-life wife Jennifer Connelly.
Oh, the irony. The man who would refute the book of Genesis was married to a true believer. That element in the life of Darwin is compelling.
Unfortunately, the epic philosophical clash between God and rationalism comes too microcosmically here — in only small snippets of dialogue between Darwin and Emma, Darwin and his clergyman (Jeremy Northam), and Darwin and an atheist colleague (Toby Jones). The fittest survives in nature, the iconoclast surmised, but sometimes only trivia survives in “Creation.”
