by Valerie Siebert

Although it’s been 150 years since the book that launched a thousand epic battles in the sea of polemic staunchness was published, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species still riles up raucous wine-in-hand debate the globe over. I remember, when I moved to the UK I was absolutely mind-blown by the fact that Darwin’s face graces the 10 quid note, something, I thought, that would cause riots, flame wars, politically devastating Freudian slips, and likely a book burning of some sort in the US. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that Creation, Jon Amiel’s biopic of the evolution theorist, had to cut through swathes of red tape to obtain a stateside release. However, the stink is not entirely deserved as, the film is much more about the scientist’s divided loyalties than about the wider scope of the bomb his ideas would set off.

Real-life married couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin essentially play themselves, but with more incest, receded hairlines, and MOR Victorian dress. Bettany’s performance, in particular, is very moving and skilled in physically illustrating on his face and in his diction the dissonance that plagued the mind of the man who “killed God”.

There’s definitely an exaggeration in Emma’s reaction to her husband’s work which to some degree contradicts history, but there is a more gentle understanding placed upon the famous scientist in that he is portrayed as having quite an aversion to the conflict he knew he was inciting. I personally always, naively, thought Darwin was the evidence to-fit-the-theory rather than the theory-to-fit-the-evidence kind of guy (like most atheists I know), but this film should bring even some of the most zealous creationists round to lend a little sympathy to the man who inadvertently destroyed his own faith and clearly maligned that fact.

His deceased daughter haunts him as a manifestation of his multiple inner conflicts, a metaphor that doesn’t hinder the message, but certainly never proves essential to it. The film also suffers from the usual biopic ‘buts’ in that everyone knows how it ends, of course he publishes the book, we wouldn’t be watching a film about him if he hadn’t. Also, it leaves out nearly all the science and research that went into the world-changing discoveries he made, but this fact lends itself to the idea that the film is not addressing the impact to come.

Any viewers wary of the controversy and stigma attached to this subject simply need to know: this is not a film about evolutionary theory, it is not a film about the existence or nonexistence of God. It is a film about Charles Darwin.