Creation

Creation

Direced by Jon Amiel

Runtime: 108 min.

The gob-smackingly manipulative tone of Creation, director Jon Amiel’s biopic of the period in Charles Darwin’s life in which he wrote his revelatory On the Origin of Species, is set as soon as we’re told in no uncertain terms that said book “has been called the biggest single idea in the history of thought.” This is the first sign of many that Amiel, the director of such condescending and thoroughly inept entertainments as Entrapment, is playing to an ideal audience seeking cheap sentimental escapism instead of a thoughtful or even engaging presentation of its subject.

That’s probably because, as you can tell from the way that introductory declaration conflates Darwin’s text with what Amiel assumes we understand to be Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution, the film is not entirely sure what its real subject is. Amiel commits the cardinal sin of biopics and confuses unenlightening biographical speculation with cutting insight into how a work of such complexity and sheer intelligence was created. It’s a film that uses slow-mo sequences of Darwin undergoing hydro-therapy, which requires him to bear the brunt of a vertical blast of firehose-strength water, as a metaphor for his personal struggle to finish On the Origin of the Species. This is what you get when you let the guy that had Sean “I’m too old for this shit” Connery teach a bodacious Catherine Zeta-Jones how to dodge security lasers try his hand at “serious” drama.

Creation fixates on Darwin’s (Paul Bettany) relationship with his daughters, as if that could somehow explain the genius of his work. According to screenwriters John Collee and Randal Keynes, they were his muses and his most constant source of vexation. He doted on them and took great pride in their burgeoning sense of curiosity. That persistent need to know apparently is what drove him when his friends, colleagues and even his wife (Jennifer Connelly) insisted that his work was courting divine wrath (“You are at war with God, Charles. You both know you can’t win.”). So, if this film is meant to be taken as a coherent connect-the-dots dramatization of Darwin’s life, we should understand that he had daughters, they took after their father, they in turn made him remember just how excited he was about his work and damn the consequences, he finished it after a long period of crippling apoplectic nerves. But only after being visited repeatedly by the ghost of a long-dead child. Only then was it possible for On the Origin of Species to exist, even though we never get to hear more than disingenuous sound bites from that text.

What’s most dispiriting about the way Creation shies away from any kind of insightful commentary on Darwin’s methodology or even the importance of his work is the way Amiel consistently patronizes his audience. There’s no room for discussion of Darwin’s text or even what it really means beyond how it affected his family in a story that achieves a dubious kind of resolution once Darwin’s strictly conservative old lady learns to accept the fact that her blaspheming hubby is on to something and by golly, it deserves to see print. It begs the question of whether or not anyone involved in the production of Creation has actually read On the Origin of the Species, a text which is as well-written as it is cogent in its theories of how the physical conditions of an animal’s environment determine its development. Somebody must have but if they can see a fitting tribute to that truly exciting work in this film, they probably also consider Entrapment to be a good popcorn flick.