Susan Granger’s review of “Creation” (Newmarket Films)
2009 was the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking scientific treatise, “On the Origin of the Species – By Means of Natural Selection,” which became the foundation of evolutionary biology. Yet Jon Amiel’s bleak, pedestrian melodrama fails to capture any of the excitement involved in that provocative, still-controversial discovery.
As the story begins, middle-aged Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) is engaged in painstaking scientific research in a quiet English village. While he and his first cousin/wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly) have several adorable children, Darwin is particularly devoted to his precocious, inquisitive 10 year-old daughter Annie (Martha West), who, unfortunately, succumbs to a mysterious illness. Her agonizing death strengthens Darwin’s logical but then-scandalous conviction that divine intervention cannot combat natural laws of survival, an idea that causes an emotional rift with devoutly religious Emma and verbal confrontations with their good friend, the local preacher, Rev. Innes, (Jeremy Northam), who denounces Darwin as a dangerous heretic for his unorthodox observations and revolutionary findings.
Based on Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes’ non-fiction book, “Annie’s Box,” using personal letters and diaries of the Darwin family, the overly ambitious, science vs. faith screenplay by John Collee dissolves into an old-fashioned, domestic melodrama about a tormented, repressed scholar and his long-suffering wife. Director Jon Amiel (“The Singing Detective,” “Entrapment”) jumps back and forth in the timeline, diluting the force of the narrative during these sometimes poignant transitions, particularly one chronicling Darwin’s rapport with an orangutan in a zoo and another digression into time-lapse nature photography. Throughout it all, cinematographer Jess Hall captures the 1850s period among the landed gentry in the English countryside.
As a side note, this is the second on-screen pairing for real-life marrieds Paul Bettany (“Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”) and Jennifer Connelly (“He’s Just Not That Into You”); they previously co-starred in the far more effective “A Beautiful Mind” (2001). On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Creation” is a self-conscious, flawed 5, floundering in search of a dramatic fulcrum.
