CREATION: Starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, and Martha West. Director Jon Amiel. Rated PG (Mild themes). 108 min.
Reviewed by Peter W Sheehan
This is a movie that re-creates the drama of the personal conflicts and religious scepticism of the English naturalist, Charles Darwin.
The film depicts Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) living in a picturesque English village, surrounded by his loving wife and children.
Death strikes Annie (Martha West), his beloved 10-year old daughter, at the same time as he is creatively grappling with the writing of his book, On the Origin of the Species, which sets out his famous theory of evolution.
His internal struggle whether to publish the book, or not, reflects the conflict between love of his deeply religious wife (Jennifer Connelly), and his developing conviction that God has no place in the world.
The movie has been released in the year of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th year of the publication of his book on evolution.
Significantly, the title of the movie does not refer to the biblical account of creation, but to the creation of the book that Darwin was trying to write.
The movie is torn between being the story of the ideas of a genius, whose theory changed the course of scientific thinking, and a more modest tale of an author with a writer’s emotional block.
Ultimately, it is a film about the struggle of writing, rather than one that offers an uncomplicated testimonial to an author’s brilliance.
Emma fundamentally opposes Darwin’s ideas, and she worries she may go to heaven without her husband from whom she would be separated for all eternity.
Darwin is a more complicated individual.
He loves his wife deeply, but has also has a history of mental illness and instability, and a predilection for spurious forms of therapy, including water therapy, which he thinks will cure his stricken child, but makes her worse.
Annie’s death convinces Darwin that there can be no divine intervention.
The relationship between Emma and Charles becomes estranged.
Emma blames Charles for her death, and herself for letting Annie go.
Darwin makes a pilgrimage to the place where Annie died.
The emotional journey eventually enables him to reconcile with Emma, and they fall in love again.
It is Emma who finally decides to publish the book; she accepts what she knows her husband really wants to do.
For her and Darwin, religious belief (or absence of it), becomes secondary to their marriage.
The movie argues that despite Emma’s dislike of his work, and Charles’s disdain for religion, it is their love that matters, and Darwin succeeds in making Emma an accomplice to his work.
There are some powerful moments in the movie.
The final scene where Annie walks alongside her father with the image of the postman and his book fading in the distance is deeply affecting, as also when Annie is punished cruelly for defending her father’s theory against the wishes of the Church.
Bettany’s performance as Darwin is outstanding, as also is Connelly’s performance as his wife.
Bettany captures Darwin’s emotional conflicts with great poignancy, and both Emma and Charles turn what might have been a slow film into a moving and engrossing one.
Jeremy Northam provides very able support as Reverend Innes, who becomes alienated as friend of the family by Darwin’s concept of secular creation.
The film is about the love between a deeply conflicted couple, and a ghost story where father and daughter commun-icate after her death through his halluc- inations.
Above all, it is a humanly told story of the rise of ideas against the personal and societal pressures of the time.
This is a film, that is less about the conflict between Science and Religion, that a testimonial to the private struggles of a man who gave to man-kind an extraordinarily significant set of ideas.
Partly biographical, and partly fictional, it is a gentle film about personal struggle.
Those who believe in biblical creation (and there are many religious people who do not) are not likely to be offended by the movie, nor in any other way.
This is a quality movie, well directed, well acted, and creatively told.
The closing titles to the film tell us that Darwin, the profound sceptic, was buried with full Christian honours in Westminster Abbey.
Peter W Sheehan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.
