Charles Darwin, his theory of evolution and his impact of world science is a familiar story. How the book, in which it is contained, came to be published in 1859 is a less well-known story. Darwin did the bulk of his research on his 5-year journey on the ship, “The Beagle”, from 1831 to 1836. When he returned to England, in December 1838, he had consolidated the broad outlines of his thesis about the basic theory of natural selection. But by 1858, 20 years later, Darwin had still not published his theory.
Other scientists and researchers were catching up with Darwin’s discoveries and they were coming to similar conclusions. The film “Creation” examines what the 20-year gap was all about and it focuses on the two years before Darwin finally published his work in 1859.
Why the long delay? Some claimed that he feared humiliation and rejection by the Christian church. Darwin was a Christian and his wife Emma was a deeply pious woman. Would the publication of the book destroy his marriage? The pressure of work, combined with his own personal emotional stress about defying the religious and philosophical values he and his closest friends had always revered, actually drove Darwin to repeated bouts of illness.
A portrait of the young Charles Darwin
The film’s title, therefore, has a double meaning. The obvious one is his theory of how the world - and everything in it - was created through a process of evolution. The other focus is much narrower. It’s about Darwin’s heart-rending effort to finally create his book. The mystery of cosmic “creation” becomes the backdrop to Darwin’s more intimate and personal effort to finish his great book.
Darwin fathered ten children, five of whom died young, but the death that affected him most deeply was that of Annie, his second child, who died at the age of ten. She was fascinated by her father’s work and his stories. She, of all his children, followed him in the fields, showed him what she had found, and her death was a deep blow to him. For many years Darwin’s religious faith had been wavering, and his inconsolable grief at the child’s death, was like a symbolic breaking-point between Darwin and the Church.
Annie Darwin died in 1851. For 13 years after returning from his voyages, Darwin had not been able write his book, Annie’s jolted him back into a sense of his own priorities. It was the turning-point that took him back to his own writing, and his completed work, published in 1859, literally changed the nature of the way we understand the natural world and caused a worldwide controversy that is, in some places and the minds of some people, is still a deeply felt and contentious issue.
The film “Creation” is the latest work to address these huge, and still deeply felt, issues of faith versus science. The source of the film is a book called “Annie’s Box”, written by Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes. He was working in the Darwin archives when he discovered a box containing keepsakes of Anne collected by Charles and Emma Darwin. It inspired him to write a new, more personal biography of Charles Darwin centered on the relationship between Darwin and his daughter.
The 2009 film “Creation” is based on that book. Paul Bettany plays Darwin and his wife Emma, is played with great style – and with a perfect British accent - by Bettany’s real-life wife, Jennifer Connelly. She was a committed Christian who believed that God alone was the author of the world and human-kind. For her it wasn’t God as a general concept. He was the specific God of Genesis, who created Man exactly as the Old Testament said, no matter what her husband’s fossils seemed to indicate otherwise.
Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly
The role was tough for Bettany and Jennifer Connelly to play a couple whose marriage is in serious trouble, was a challenge. After they had both accepted the roles, Paul Bettany had a moment of panic. “As rehearsal started”, said Bettany, “It was like ‘Oh my God, we’ve said yes to this and we’re actually going to work together and what’s that going to be like?’ I knew that I would not be able to go home after a day’s shooting and slag off the leading actress to my wife - because she is the leading actress”.“As it turned out”, he continued,” it was such an easy working relationship and she is a fantastic actress. I knew that before and I know it even more now. Working with her was great, really great.”
“We were working 15 hours a day, on six-day weeks and you only get Sundays off, and so often actors are too tired to bring all that emotion home with you and sometimes they lose sight of the family. For us, when we needed to talk about a scene you are doing together the next day, it’s great to have the person you are working with right there,” said Bettany.
“This film is a story about a marriage in crisis and the loss of a child. That would be compelling enough even if it wasn’t about Darwin, but Darwin was being torn between his personal scientific beliefs and his wife’s deep Christian faith. It was an intense shoot and when we got to the end of the day’s work, the truth of it was that we were in rags – we would go home, put the kids to bed, eat and go to bed. There was no time to sit around and talk about the film,” he said.
“I will say that, initially it was an exercise in complete frustration because the amount that Darwin wrote and the amount that has subsequently been written about him meant that I was always looking at a pillar of unread books. What struck me was that he was a social conservative with a revolutionary idea and that’s painful. For him, it was all about the information. He was rigorous and he read a book on economics and he sort of took the formula and saw it in nature everywhere and suddenly couldn’t stop seeing it. What he discovered, with meticulous research, meant that he couldn’t deny the fact that gradual changes over time happen if you want to survive in your environment” said Bettany.
“Most people tend to reduce Darwin’s theory to the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ but this not so. It’s more the survival of the most apt and survival of the most keen to adapt, really. Once he grasped that idea, he just couldn’t stop seeing it and I think that is what induced his illness. He knew that his discoveries were going to be like a bomb going off. He also knew, of course, that his wife took great solace in her religion after the death of their children. In the film we focus on the loss of one child but in fact they lost three” said Bettany.
“The Randal Keynes’ book was very important for my research”, he continued. “I got the script and I thought it was beautiful, one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. It’s John Collee who wrote ’Master and Commander ’and he’s the bollocks. Randal Keynes is all things Darwin - he is his great, great grandson, which meant we had that seal of approval right from the beginning. That’s crucial because you are dealing with that biographical stuff. But the key is a story that is driven by a marriage in crisis and the loss of a child. That would be compelling enough, even if it wasn’t about Darwin, but because it was about him, it was deeper and more profound”.
“When Darwin first came back after his research on “The Beagle” he immediately became a bit of a star in the scientific community but there were a lot of contributing factors”, said Bettany. “His wife’s religious convictions, his fear of causing social disorder and of being ostracised by the academic world that had initially embraced him challenged him deeply. He constantly questioned what he was doing” said Bettany. “He wrote about those misgivings quite clinically. He asked himself ‘Why did I come up with this idea? How did this come to me?’ And he put it down to the fact that he was incredibly observant – he has this over-developed muscle for observation without putting any pre-determined ideas on it. It was all information for him and he was clearly incredibly thorough in his research, and that’s also part of why it took 20 years for him to write the book” said Bettany.
“He really loved her. She had ten children and in their marriage there was not a time she wasn’t pregnant, they did not stop having children. She had her last child at 49 and in that era it’s extraordinary. They just entirely adored each other but they also had this incredibly alienating experience at a time when she was being drawn into religion and he was being pulled apart” he said.
The result is a film about a complex and difficult relationship, but also an intensely loyal and generous love relationship strengthened by their respect and loyalty for each other. Beautifully shot in rural England, with precisely observed details that shape both the relationship and the larger story of Darwin’s impact on the scientific world make the film fascinating. John Colley’s script balances the vast social and intellectual impact of Darwin’s work, with the subtle insight of his portrayal of Darwin’s relationship with Emma and their children, and it makes for a rare, tender and fascinating film.