An odd one this, telling the story of the writing of On the Origin of Species. Promoted as one of the flagships of 2009’s Darwin Year, the film had the active involvement of one of Darwin’s descendants, Randall Keynes, but it doesn’t exactly do Darwin or Darwinism any favours. While Paul Bettany gives an excellent and nuanced performance as Darwin, convincingly portraying him as the relatively young family man he was at the time of writing Origin rather than the beardy sage of cliché, the film’s attempt at dramatising the struggles behind the book’s creation badly misfires. While some dramatic license is inevitable, such as truncating the period of time between the death of his beloved daughter Annie and the writing of Origin, a lot of what the film either implies or dramatises directly is just wrong.
From the start, Darwin is shown as estranged from his family by both illness and work, his children distant, his wife uneasy about what he is doing, tormented by his theory’s denial of God; but Darwin’s warm family life is well known and documented, and there is not a shred of evidence that his wife had any problems with evolutionary theory. His manuscripts include many helpful notes from her, and her letters are likewise free of complaint, although she doesn’t hesitate to criticise Charles on other matters in them. It also suggests Annie’s death destroyed Darwin’s religious faith, and that evolutionary theory was his revenge on God, but his Christianity had already waned before her death. However, he expected to be buried in his local churchyard, remained an enthusiastic supporter of missionary societies, and never abandoned a belief in some kind of deity. This, and the fact that Darwin hated any form of confrontation, makes it exceptionally unlikely that he would have indulged in the repeated sarcastic ridiculing of the local vicar, as he is shown to do in Creation. Darwin was, very clearly, in the word coined by his close colleague TH Huxley to describe himself, an agnostic, not an atheist. Which flags up another howler, Huxley appears early in the film to goad Darwin into publishing Origin, crowing “You’ve killed God… and I say good riddance to the vindictive old bugger” – hardly the words of someone who’d gone to the trouble of coining a new word to describe his belief in a deity not defined by any religion.
The treatment of Darwin’s illness is odd as well, while giving an excellent impression of the tedious and debilitating nature of his sufferings, the film has him hallucinating wildly, constantly having visions of his late daughter. A handy dramatic device to convey his abiding grief, I am sure, but so in-your-face that I felt the need to check whether Darwin had indeed written On the Origin of Species rather than Naked Lunch.
The filming, though, is sumptuous. Down House and its surroundings have never looked lovelier, and there is an excellent eye for period detail, particularly the quackery in which Victorian medicine was still heavily mired. Bettany brings the part of Darwin affectionately to life (as Jennifer Connelly and Martha West do the roles of Darwin’s wife and daughter), and the sense of his meticulous and dogged pursuit of the solid facts of evolution are made very clear. It is a pity, though, that the central performances are not supported by a decent script and that many of the other roles are barely more than caricatures.
In essence, the plot of Creation amounts to the story of how a weak, sickly, grief-stricken man of questionable mental stability, but with a revolutionary idea, is badgered into publishing a devastating attack on God by some malevolent scientists with an atheistic agenda, against the better counsel of his saintly religious wife. This is a picture that Darwinism’s detractors will love and is about as far from the truth as you can get. But then the story of how a shy, ill, but industrious agnostic country gent, with nothing against God and supported by a loving family, worked steadily for years collecting evidence for a groundbreaking theory just isn’t dramatic enough for modern tastes, I suppose.
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