Creation: The good, the bad, and the ugly

It's a given: we're diehard Charles Darwin fans. So how can we resist a film that projects his life onto the big screen -- his study filled with flasks and beakers, stuffed birds, fountain pens, giant beetles, and a locked treasure chest with the beginnings of On the Origin of Species?

At center of the new movie, Creation, is a 50-year-old Darwin at his peak creativity, in 1859, the year Origin is published. The conspicuously beardless Darwin (Paul Bettany) is sickly, from his travels on the HMS Beagle, from the death of his beloved daughter Annie, and from the burden of disavowing God. As Darwin grapples with the implications of publicizing the full breadth of his research, the memory of his recently departed 10-year-old daughter haunts him, literally, with psychotic visions of her ghost.The emotion surrounding Annie's untimely death overwhelms the film, which is adapted from the biography Annie's Box, written by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes. Compared to the insights into Darwin's work and philosophical reckonings in the movie, his struggle to come to grips with his daughter's passing is a sentimental distraction. Creation seems to suggest that Annie's death, which occurred the same year Darwin completed Origin, was the trigger that compelled his writing --- exposing the rift between religion and biology that smoldered between Darwin and his devout wife and cousin Emma (Jennifer Connelly, who is Paul Bettany's real-life wife). Hydrotherapy and psychoanalysis bring Darwin to confront his family issues, tender looks are exchanged, "relations" are resumed, and Darwin's writer's block is vanquished.While this may have been the case, I found vastly more compelling the scenes where renowned biologist Thomas Huxley and botanist Joseph Hooker -- part of the nine-member X-Club that met monthly and was united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas" -- visit the frail Darwin to persuade him to put to rest all notions of God and write his tome. After all, it was 22 years since he joined Robert FitzRoy on the voyage of HMS Beagle, and his procrastinations had permitted Wallace to scoop his natural selection theory in a mere 20 pages. Indeed, those of us who live our lives in science might surmise that the Wallace essay gave Darwin that age-old "publish or perish" anxiety and spurred the publication of his manuscript.Creation presents visual treasures and thought-provoking drama -- including recreations of Darwin's garden and pigeon shed, and flashbacks of FitzRoy stealing Fuegian children in exchange for brass buttons in order to "civilize" them in the name of Her Majesty. Particularly moving was the sequence of Darwin bonding with Jenny -- a young orangutan captured in Borneo, now lonely in Queen Victoria's zoological garden -- and musing on the likeness of apes and humans. Yet this is overshadowed by an unattractive truth about who might get to see the film and experience such illuminating passages.The ugly news is that Creation had difficulty finding a US distributor and it remains uncertain whether it will be widely screened before American audiences. Not only does a linkurl:recent Gallop poll;http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/Darwin-Birthday-Believe-Evolution.aspx reveal that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution (a "half-baked theory" that informed Adolph Hitler's genocide, according to the Christian-influenced linkurl:Movieguide.com;http://www.movieguide.org/articles/1/463/book-review-darwins-racists-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow ), but apparently the majority of US moviegoers prefer flying dragon-vampires to historical drama. According to director Jon Amiel in a linkurl:Wired.com interview,;http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/creation/ "The fact is that any independent movie that's A) about something, B) period and C) a drama, is likely to have a very hard time finding distribution these days." Did this sad commentary on American society not only limit distribution, but also inform the distracting, ghost-infused story line of Creation? Regardless of the film's few letdowns, it succeeds at portraying a smooth-faced Darwin in love with ideas and with life, grappling with a question (often with his actual words! eloquent!) that remains impossibly frightening to many, a century-and-a-half later. One can only pray (to whomever) that Creationists and their children have ample opportunity to see this movie and many more of its ilk, conveying the beauty and complexity of science and evolution.Creation is playing for a limited time in a handful of theatres in New York, Washington, DC, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Darwin's Minstrel;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56158/
[20th November 2009]*linkurl:Darwin vs. His Dad, circa 1831;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55374/
[February 2009]*linkurl:Darwinian Time;http://www.the-scientist.com/2009/01/1/26/1/
[January 2009]

Creation: The good, the bad, and the ugly

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