How he saw the world changed it forever
Creation (2009) may not have done very well at the box office, and had mixed reviews, but I found it extremely moving. The importance of the theory of evolution of species through natural selection is hugely important in our modern world, and the story of the man who travelled the world in his youth, and then spent 20 years developing the theory into a well-substantiated, carefully-articulated explanation of the story of life is of great interest.
According to Wikipedia, the story is factually based, being an adaptation of the book "Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution" by Darwin's great-great grandson, Randal Keynes. The title of the book gives the key to this film's interpretation, the story hinging on Darwin's relationship with his daughter, Annie, who died young.
The plot zig-zags between two key periods in Darwin's life: the course of the illness of Darwin's oldest and much beloved child, Annie, and a later period of time, when Darwin's work should have been reaching fruition, but finds him paralysed by a number of things, effectively stifling his scientific output. During this period Darwin's suffered chronic ill health, and was in conflict with his wife, Emma, a devout Christian, about the direction of his work. He was also wracked with guilt about the death of his child, Annie. Annie appears to him, as a kind of ghostly companion, with whom he converses. As Darwin listens to animal breeders, who speak knowledgeably about the frequent casualties incurred when mating closely related animals together in order to select desired inheritable characteristics, he comes to realise that Annie's illness may not have been random in origin, but may have its roots in the very nature of his and Emma's family closeness: being first cousins before marriage.
As the two story-lines develop, Darwin comes under increasing pressure from outside, and also, internally, shown partly through sleeping and waking dreams and visions, particularly of Annie, whose life-like presence becomes increasingly harder for Darwin to tolerate. Others may have disliked the device of Darwin interacting with Annie's ghost, but I thought it worked on many levels. For him to fully reject Christianity would mean necessarily losing the last vestige of her, her spirit. We also see the loving relationship Darwin enjoyed in former times with his wife, Emma, contrasted with the frosty alienation in the later period.
The performances by Bettany and Connelly (real life husband and wife) are superb, perfectly embodying the conflict and crisis in the Darwin family. Bettany brilliantly portrays the pain of conflict of a man whose intellectual discoveries bring him increasingly into conflict with local community life and his family's religious traditions and beliefs. Connelly personifies a devout woman bitterly at odds with her husband's beliefs. Nice performances too from Martha West (Annie), the talented Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones (Darwin's scientific colleagues, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Huxley), Jeremy Northam (Reverend John Brodie-Innes, the local vicar).
Interesting how the content of the film is ostensibly about one key scientific domain, the theory of evolution, but how the real subject is one of psychology: how Darwin is being paralysed and made physically ill by his own subconscious (an entity he himself sneeringly dismisses) and the subconscious guilt he feels for the death of his daughter, Annie, and how the film's climax takes the form of a psychological release relating to the expiation of guilt, and voicing of subconscious or largely unspoken fears between he and his wife.
As a coda, in connection with the publication of Darwin's book (On the Origin of Species, 1859), one has to wonder at the casualness of the postal service of the day, and remark how, with a single catastrophic jolt from a stone under the wheel of a post cart, our understanding of the living world around us, and ourselves, might have been terribly impoverished.
According to Wikipedia, Darwin's theory of evolution is still so controversial in the USA, outside the intellectual strongholds of the West and East coasts, that it took months of lobbying to find a distributor. Quote from Wikipedia: "According to producer Jeremy Thomas, the United States was one of the last countries to find a distributor due to the prominence of the Creation-evolution controversy. Thomas said: "It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He [God] made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and Los Angeles, religion rules."
I think one stumbling block is that many people take the word "theory" to mean untested "hypothesis" or notion, something that still very much that needs to be verified. But in science, a theory is a much stronger entity. It is an explanation that has to fit in with verifiable facts, and has to be framed so that it can be shown to be false. But though many have argued against Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, nobody has been able to falsify it on genuine evidence-based scientific rational grounds, only on religious grounds. Of course, it is a work in progress, but subsequent evidence of carbon-dating and discoveries in genetics, including the role of DNA in the cells as biological blueprints, all support Darwin's great idea. To date, addressing the question of life on Earth, and taking into account huge mountains of evidence, it is the best explanation we have.
References
- Director: Jon Amiel
- Writers: John Collee (based on the book "Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution" by Darwin's great-great grandson, Randal Keynes)
- Starring: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Paterson, Jim Carter
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 30 Jul 2011
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in WriteRoom, formatted using TextWrangler and HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro
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