Saturday February 6, 2010

CREATION

UK,  2009         108 minutes    PG certificate
Directed by Jon Amiel, starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Toby Jones, Jeremy Northam, Jim Carter, Benedict Cumberbatch

Jon Amiel’s considered and reasoned film was released last year to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species.

The events of the film take place in the years before this publication, at a time when Darwin found himself in personal conflict over the implications of his emerging convictions. Charles, once a churchgoer whose faith had been destroyed by his increasingly held scientific beliefs, was married to a woman who put Christian faith before everything else in her life. The couple were also grieving the loss of a beloved daughter, Annie, a loss that Charles blamed himself for, and one even more impossible to reconcile in the absence of God and afterlife. The stresses created by these circumstances form the basis of the film, a microcosm of the impact of his evolutionary theory on a predominantly God-fearing world, and writer John Collee intelligently uses supporting characters Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) and the Reverend John Innes (Jeremy Northam) to explore the wider evolutionary debate.

The film does justice to Darwin’s theories, but it also celebrates intellectual endeavour, a time when scientific breakthrough was the result of individual, private thinking, the importance of eloquent prose, handwritten in manuscripts of pen and ink.  Paul Bettany’s Darwin is not an intellectual firebrand and religious iconoclast, but a softly spoken man of humility – Darwin fans and detractors are reminded that that far from taking an axe to an ordered world, the 'man who killed God' expressed his beliefs with polite eloquence, reasoned intelligence and with considerable courage. 

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