Director: Jon Amiel
Screenplay: John Colley
Camera: Jess Hall
Music: Christopher Young.
Costume Designer: Louise Stjernsward
Cast: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam , Toby Jones
UK 108 min.

The Bottom Line

This incisive and intimate film offers a completely fresh insight into the life and work of Charles Darwin, viewed not through the prism of his unique and extraordinary mind, as he is usually seen, but through his own most intimate relationships with his family and friends. The great grey-bearded academic fades away, to show the passionate, idealistic father and husband. Paul Bettany gives his best ever performance, Jennifer Connelly is superb and John Amiel’s subtle and tender insight makes for a most exceptional and moving film. 

Paul Bettany as Darwin

Main Review.

Forget everything you know about Darwin, evolution, the “Origin of Species” and the scandal it caused. That’s not what this film is about. These things form the backdrop but the film’s focus is intensely focused not on a scientist, but on a man, Charles Darwin, who was a Christian, married to a woman he loved and who loved him in return, and they had a family together. Nothing could be more ordinary than Darwin’s family life, except his unique turn of mind, and his endlessly and obsessively curious sense of logic. 

Director John Amiel said “Darwin 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 books on economics and he sort of took that formula and saw it being applied in nature everywhere he looked, 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 Amiel.

His insights and research, clashed radically with Christian theology and with the principles of his beloved wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly), who was a deeply devout Christian. That clash between what he had formerly believed and what he had subsequently discovered, plunged Darwin into a kind of psychosomatic illness. Between the years of research and discovery on the voyage of the “Beagle”, and the point at which he actually wrote “On the Origin of Species” 15 years of silence had elapsed.

Darwin wrote and published nothing even though he continued with his research; he was haunted by the growing rift between himself and Emma, and between his work and the Church.  The death of their 10 year-old daughter, Annie, was a blow which finally shattered Darwin’s remaining religious principles, and plunged him into the deepest distress on all fronts.   

This film is based a book titled "Annie’s Box" by Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes, in which he wrote an affectionate and emotional account of Darwin’s successful marriage and the tragedy of losing his young daughter to illness. Screenwriter John Colley makes brilliant use of this tragedy and he writes scenes in which Annie is seen with her father and while this is often just a fragment of memory, those fleeting illusions challenge Darwin in a profound way.

That’s the core of this film, the time of creative and psychological blockage that prevented his from creating the work for which he eventually became renowned. It’s a study of a relationship under deep emotional stress and it’s about the trauma of losing a child. Paul Bettany reaches a new high in his career, with this intense and perfectly focused performance. It’s eloquent, emotionally coherent and so honest that you can hardly imagine that it is being acted.

 Jennifer Connelly, sporting a perfect British accent, plays the conflicted wife with great tenderness and courage. Perhaps the fact that these two actors are married in real life added to the delicacy and honesty of the film, but whatever the case the acting is delicate and effective.

The Victorian costumes created by Louise Stjernsward are impeccable and the evocation of that High Victorian age is effortlessly caught, and without intruding into the story, Jess hall’s limpid, delicate cinematography creates and real and credible world in which the drama plays out. It’s a marvelously sleek and elegant film, illuminated by two really dazzling performances and a story that will linger in your mind much longer than you might imagine.    

Other Voices

“The Hollywood Reporter”, Ray Bennett

Amiel’s greatest achievement is that Creation is a deeply human film with moments of genuine lightness and high spirits to go with all the deep thinking.
 

“Philadelphia Inquirer”, Carrie Rickey

Jon Amiel’s moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

“Premiere, Adam Christie”

It’s a captivating story presented with a fresh and artistic spirit, putting a human face on the man behind the theories.

“Chicago Reader” J.R. Jones

So few movies these days concern themselves with ideas of any sort that a drama like this one, about a man humbled by the consequences of his own intellectual breakthrough, seems even more powerful.