Film Review: “Creation” Directed by Jon Amiel

“Creation”
Director: Jon Amiel
Writers: John Collee, Randal Keynes    
PG-13, 108 minutes

Reviewed by Martha K. Baker

“You talk as if we’re at war.”
“We are at war -- with religion.”
“You have killed God, sir. Good riddance to the vindictive old bugger.”
“I no longer believe that God made all in seven days.”
“He is in a battle with God -- which he cannot win.”

    The dialogue in “Creation,” as in the lines above, casts God as an unseen but omnipresent character, for much of the movie posits science versus religion. “Creation” is a good (if pillowy) place to observe the battles Charles Darwin fought between gathering the data to draw conclusions and writing them down. The film looks on a Nineteenth Century wrestling match, now in overtime.

    The film concentrates, not on his research (although there are romantic flashbacks to the journey of HMS Beagle) but on the period of time when Darwin is gripped by grief (and guilt) over the death of his daughter Annie and worried over the death of life as he knows it if he publishes his findings. His catatonia is juxtaposed against his beloved wife Emma’s more energetic manner: she burrows into thoughts of heaven and the words of her priest to comfort her as she mothers her other children. Annie speaks to Darwin lovingly and logically in death, as she did in life, encouraging her father to re-consider the notes he took on her as she grew.

    Those data, stored in a trunk, became the principal metaphor in a book called Annie’s Box, written by Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, and on which John Collee wrote the screenplay for “Creation.” It is not a grand script; rather, it is too often simplistic in explaining a very complicated time when many truths were bumping against many myths in science and religion. But, perhaps, one of the only ways to see this time is to see it as human -- as domestic, not just scientific. In the end, “Creation” insists that Charles Darwin did not, willy-nilly, ink onto paper his theory about species’ origins just to see whom he could tee-off for more than 100 years.

    This Charles Darwin is beset by the demons of data and bedeviled by emotion. He appears in a variety of settings: in his study, among his specimens of “every creeping thing,” with a generous orangutan, under hydrotherapy, and in his sickbed. He is seen with his oldest child, alive and dead; with Emma; and with his vicar. His friends, Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, coach him to continue writing his conclusions -- though his hundreds of pages will be a flood compared to the mere 20-page trickle of Alfred Russell Wallace’s similar conclusion.

    Paul Bettany (“The Young Victoria”) does a good job of showing Darwin as a delicate, tortured, brilliant man. Bettany’s wife Jennifer Connelly, whom he met on the set of “A Beautiful Mind,” masters the Mrs., if not her British accent. Handsome Jeremy Northam makes the Rev. Innes not simply an easy enemy. Benedict Cumberbatch captures Hooker, the sympathetic friend. Toby Jones, whose roles have ranged from Truman Capote, Swifty Lazare, Karl Rove and the voice of Dobby, nails Huxley as a biting bulldog. Martha West makes Annie believable as a wise child and a ghost of that child.
    
    Director Jon Amiel presents bouts in the supposed battle between science and religion: in two such rounds, the rector punishes Annie by forcing her to kneel on rock salt for saying the word “dinosaur” when God knows there were no such beasts, and the congregation sings the anthem, “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

    Amiel, whose principal work has been on television, tries valiantly to tell the human story of the writing of an earth-changing theory, as shattering to biology as plate-techtonics was to geology a century later. Amiel focuses his cameras on Darwin’s ink-stained hands, on splashes of sun playing in the cataract of hydrotherapy, on luxurious English interiors, and verdant, teeming exteriors. In his mess of a film, it’s not always clear when Annie is alive or dead, but that only rehearses the messy re-introduction of the natural world to the 19th Century.

    With “Creation,” the writers and director want desperately to show Darwin the man, and if it sends even a few people to actually read The Origin of the Species or to think for themselves, it will have succeeded in opening hearts and minds.