Chris Knipp
01-25-2010, 01:48 AM
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Jon Amiel: Creation (2009)
Deaths and tremors and a book that changed the world
Review by Chris Knipp
How Charles Darwin finally got around to finishing his long delayed masterwork The Origin of Species is depicted in Jon Amiel's lush but gridlocked film as having involved overcoming psycho-somatic illnesses from guilt and sorrow after the death of his ten-year-old first-born daughter Annie (Martha West), as well as working through the disapproval toward his theories of his devoutly Christian wife. The conflict between evolution theory and the Book of Genesis, though still a hot topic in 21st-century America, takes second place to Darwin's psychological torments and family problems.
This movie is beautiful to look at but hard to follow at times as it tries to liven things up with both flashbacks and torrid dream sequences. Vomiting, sweating inexplicably, and tormented by tremors, the great man, capably if a bit monotonously embodied by Paul Bettany, appears at first to be suffering from some unknown tropical disease picked up in his South American travels. Eventually, after a series of scenes that are as lively visually as they are static in narrative terms -- for much of the time the story comes to a virtual standstill -- Darwin recovers from his more extreme dysfunctions. This happens with the help of hydrotherapy and the famous Dr. Gully, ably played by Bill Paterson. Gully pinpoints the causes of the illness as internal. For the treatment Darwin goes to Malvern; but that is also where Annie dies, in a scene worthy of Dickins. Somehow -- the chronology is unclear -- Darwin cheers up, makes peace with his wife, and, with her approval after all, finally mails off the manuscript of his seminal work.
Earlier Darwin is visited at his country retreat by his friend Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones), who's excited by the budding theories of changing species. "You've killed God, Sir," Huxley cries. But the declaration is premature; it's to be a while yet. Darwin has to struggle with the death of his favorite (and preternaturally articulate) daughter (among a vague unspecified many offspring of the two cousins), and have some heated (and overly obvious) clashes with the local minister, the Reverend Innes (Jeremy Northam) before he's going to be ready to put his notes on species together, and challenge the doctrine of "Creation" -- a word not explicitly used in the film except in its title.
The film's riches include Darwin's colorful narration to his children of an episode of trading buttons for wild girls in Tierra del Fuego and bringing them back to England; but the lesson of this experiment is passed over too quickly. Most charming and all too brief is the scientist's love affair with a sweet, but, like Annie, doomed young orangutan, Jenny, in the London zoo. The scene depicting the poor caged Jenny's expiration in Darwin's lap is even more moving and memorable than Annie's, and the orangutan is, just marginally, the better actor. This sequence is remarkable. But what Darwin learned from observing Jenny isn't fully developed, though both tales are essential to his progress toward evolutionary theory.
Beautiful and dramatic though the film intermittently is, we don't learn a whole lot about how the thinking and the writing got done. Creation is understandably strained to convey all Darwin's multiferous scientific projects and papers, the stress of pursuing which may have had an even more dire effect on the man than his daughter's death. Movies are rarely good at showing thought and ceaselessly generous in telegraphing emotion. It appears the source book by Darwin's great-great grandson Randall Keynes offers more about the intellectual and public side of the experiences dramatized here, and his account doesn't reveal this feverish, crazed man. The story has been made more surreal and melodramatic.
As Emma, Darwin's wife, Jennifer Connelly works so hard at her English accent she's hard to understand. Though she has flashes of dazzling piano playing, the screenplay otherwise makes her more stiff and severe and less accomplished than the real Emma Darwin. What we can say is that she looks slim and fetching in her Victorian dresses. She is a presence -- just not an entirely convincing one. Despite her own evident conviction, she fails to convince. For that mater Bettany, though he has no trouble impersonating an Englishman, since he is one, or resembling the young Darwin (except for the overhanging brow), falls into the failing of so many actors: he projects emotional intelligence better than the other kind. Not enough of the dialogue spells out the religious conflicts between Emma and Charles.
In the film Darwin enters into a state of melancholy that becomes a kind of visionary bad trip. Annie appears like a ghost, Darwin's whole body shakes, specimens come to life in jars. The hydrotherapy sequences look like some spectral nineteenth-century version of Abu Ghraib. And yet, for all the inter-cutting of flashbacks, speeded-up sequences of vermin, and apparitions, Amiel shows less flair here than he did years ago in "The Singing Detective." In the end the whole film reads as a confusing ghost story. But above all it's the story of a funk. And though the movie doesn't take us as deeply and giddily into the world of mental disturbance as it might have done, it does leave us confusedly wondering what exactly it is that we've just watched.
Jon Amiel: Creation (2009)
Deaths and tremors and a book that changed the world
Review by Chris Knipp
How Charles Darwin finally got around to finishing his long delayed masterwork The Origin of Species is depicted in Jon Amiel's lush but gridlocked film as having involved overcoming psycho-somatic illnesses from guilt and sorrow after the death of his ten-year-old first-born daughter Annie (Martha West), as well as working through the disapproval toward his theories of his devoutly Christian wife. The conflict between evolution theory and the Book of Genesis, though still a hot topic in 21st-century America, takes second place to Darwin's psychological torments and family problems.
This movie is beautiful to look at but hard to follow at times as it tries to liven things up with both flashbacks and torrid dream sequences. Vomiting, sweating inexplicably, and tormented by tremors, the great man, capably if a bit monotonously embodied by Paul Bettany, appears at first to be suffering from some unknown tropical disease picked up in his South American travels. Eventually, after a series of scenes that are as lively visually as they are static in narrative terms -- for much of the time the story comes to a virtual standstill -- Darwin recovers from his more extreme dysfunctions. This happens with the help of hydrotherapy and the famous Dr. Gully, ably played by Bill Paterson. Gully pinpoints the causes of the illness as internal. For the treatment Darwin goes to Malvern; but that is also where Annie dies, in a scene worthy of Dickins. Somehow -- the chronology is unclear -- Darwin cheers up, makes peace with his wife, and, with her approval after all, finally mails off the manuscript of his seminal work.
Earlier Darwin is visited at his country retreat by his friend Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones), who's excited by the budding theories of changing species. "You've killed God, Sir," Huxley cries. But the declaration is premature; it's to be a while yet. Darwin has to struggle with the death of his favorite (and preternaturally articulate) daughter (among a vague unspecified many offspring of the two cousins), and have some heated (and overly obvious) clashes with the local minister, the Reverend Innes (Jeremy Northam) before he's going to be ready to put his notes on species together, and challenge the doctrine of "Creation" -- a word not explicitly used in the film except in its title.
The film's riches include Darwin's colorful narration to his children of an episode of trading buttons for wild girls in Tierra del Fuego and bringing them back to England; but the lesson of this experiment is passed over too quickly. Most charming and all too brief is the scientist's love affair with a sweet, but, like Annie, doomed young orangutan, Jenny, in the London zoo. The scene depicting the poor caged Jenny's expiration in Darwin's lap is even more moving and memorable than Annie's, and the orangutan is, just marginally, the better actor. This sequence is remarkable. But what Darwin learned from observing Jenny isn't fully developed, though both tales are essential to his progress toward evolutionary theory.
Beautiful and dramatic though the film intermittently is, we don't learn a whole lot about how the thinking and the writing got done. Creation is understandably strained to convey all Darwin's multiferous scientific projects and papers, the stress of pursuing which may have had an even more dire effect on the man than his daughter's death. Movies are rarely good at showing thought and ceaselessly generous in telegraphing emotion. It appears the source book by Darwin's great-great grandson Randall Keynes offers more about the intellectual and public side of the experiences dramatized here, and his account doesn't reveal this feverish, crazed man. The story has been made more surreal and melodramatic.
As Emma, Darwin's wife, Jennifer Connelly works so hard at her English accent she's hard to understand. Though she has flashes of dazzling piano playing, the screenplay otherwise makes her more stiff and severe and less accomplished than the real Emma Darwin. What we can say is that she looks slim and fetching in her Victorian dresses. She is a presence -- just not an entirely convincing one. Despite her own evident conviction, she fails to convince. For that mater Bettany, though he has no trouble impersonating an Englishman, since he is one, or resembling the young Darwin (except for the overhanging brow), falls into the failing of so many actors: he projects emotional intelligence better than the other kind. Not enough of the dialogue spells out the religious conflicts between Emma and Charles.
In the film Darwin enters into a state of melancholy that becomes a kind of visionary bad trip. Annie appears like a ghost, Darwin's whole body shakes, specimens come to life in jars. The hydrotherapy sequences look like some spectral nineteenth-century version of Abu Ghraib. And yet, for all the inter-cutting of flashbacks, speeded-up sequences of vermin, and apparitions, Amiel shows less flair here than he did years ago in "The Singing Detective." In the end the whole film reads as a confusing ghost story. But above all it's the story of a funk. And though the movie doesn't take us as deeply and giddily into the world of mental disturbance as it might have done, it does leave us confusedly wondering what exactly it is that we've just watched.