TAKE THE BEARD off Karl Marx, and what you see is a romantic poet, wrote historian A.J.P. Taylor. The same idea informs director Jon Amiel’s take on Charles Darwin in Creation. Without the crescent-shaped beard, Darwin (Paul Bettany) is not just a romantic but also a quivering neurotic. The script by John Collee shows us Darwin in the period leading up to the publishing of On the Origin of Species. He’s a nervous wreck, tormented by the declining health of his beloved daughter Annie (Martha West) and unable to confront his religious wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), about his scientific findings.
Creation is unstuck in time; we have to judge the hairline on Bettany’s toupees to tell us where we are in the tale. The film uses the Ken Russell approach to this scientist; he’s a haunted man in an unholy racket, killing legions of pigeons to examine their skeletons. Darwin’s health was supposedly very bad, although watching Creation is like watching House M.D.: It’s not lupus, is it? Was it all psychosomatic illness, a literal fear and trembling of a scientist assaulting the majesty of God? One listens to Darwin’s noble prose on the soundtrack and tries to link it to the nigh–grand mal seizure we’re watching: the hallucinations of dead Galapagos finches coming to life and breaking out of their bell jar and scorpions scuttling to life. To treat himself, Darwin erects a water tower and sits under cascades of cold water, which are far less chilly than the stares Emma gives him as she rumbles on her piano. She has her views. So does Jeremy Northam as the bigoted village vicar; he’s the reactionary equivalent of Toby Jones’ Thomas Huxley, sneering and gloating over the death of God.
Here, then, is one of those biopics that make you want to run straight out of the theater and go find a good book on the subject. One thing you can judge about Darwin, even without a book handy, is that he wasn’t working in an utter vacuum. If you take this movie at face value, Darwin never heard of Mendel and was shocked at the fact that poultry will inbreed, though everyone who has raised chickens knows this. He apparently had never listened to Hamlet giving a fine one-sentence description of the food chain (Act 4, Scene 3); in the form of time-lapse photography, Bettany’s Darwin imagines the bird feeding on the worm and then the worm feeding on the bird, as if he had discovered that notion along with evolution. The script’s anachronism (“We need to talk,” Darwin tells his wife) further draws you out.
As The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane noted, Creation‘s showstopper is a performance by a beautiful young orangutan. Martha West is almost as touching—it’s a high bar to reach—but her role as a smiling yet sinister daughter is the movie’s highlight. West is going places. Creation tries to remind us of the price Darwin paid for his genius, but here is a father of evolution fit to please any smooth religious sadist; they can look and say, “We always told you Darwin was insane.”
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
CREATION (PG-13; 108 min.), directed by Jon Amiel, written by John Collee, based on the book by Randal Keynes, photographed by Jess Hall and starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, opens Jan. 29.
