"For God is deaf nowadays, and will not hear us, and for our guilt he grinds good men to dust." - William Langland
Jon Amiel directs "Creation". Focusing on the final years in the life of Charles Darwin, the film was based on a novel by Randal Keynes, Darwin's own great-great grandson.
The 19th century saw the Church having to fend off the teachings of what it deemed an Unholy Trinity: Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. By situating human beings within a biological, psycho-socio-economic and eventually genetic context, the schools of thought spawned by this trio would become increasingly vital for the examination of human beings. But for the Church, these teachings were perverse, sacrilegious and threatening.
Darwin's findings were perhaps the most disturbing of the three. He synthesised the work of his predecessors and, together with his own research, formed a kind of unified theory of evolution. Suddenly, living things were not created by a supreme being, but were the constantly morphing products of accidental mutation, adaptation and natural selection.
The narcissistic illusions of man were further trampled by Freud. If Darwin became the precursor to modern behavioural genetics, Freud, whose models anticipated today's cognitivist-neurobiologist models of the human mind, became the precursor to modern neuroscience. Suddenly humans were seen to be, not rational beings in full control of their actions and desires, but fickle things governed by unconscious drives, socio-cultural forces, ideological assumptions and a concept of "self" that is largely fictional. More than this, Freud showed how society as a whole is a kind of magnified product of such drives, neuroses and psychoses.
But for the ruling class, Marx was perhaps the most dangerous. For Marx, economic systems buffet human behaviour, and give rise to and directly influence most other social phenomena, including social relations, political and legal systems, morality and ideology. Like an organism with drives of its own, Marx also demonstrated the contradictions inherent to capitalism, contradictions which themselves give rise to various observable phenomenon.
Like Copernicus, who demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, this Unholy Trio deprived humans of their central place in the universe. But Jon Amiel's "Creation" deals with the existential turmoil such findings exerted on Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) specifically. It watches as Darwin struggles to write "On the Origin of the Species", the content of which troubles him, his family and wife, the latter of whom is portrayed as a Christian woman.
"There's something terrible about reality, but I don't know what it is," a character says in Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert", one of cinema's great existential pictures. In "Creation", Darwin confronts something similar. He becomes super-conscious, now intimately aware of a cosmos that is awash with murder, cruelty, death and decay, "endless forms most beautiful" scrambling over one another, perpetually locked in coitus and carnage. These revelations sicken him, nauseate him, take a toll on his mind and body, but he refuses to renounce his beliefs, beliefs which pit him against a 19th century England that is largely religious.
Unlike modern films which attempt to portray spiritual or existential crises ("Melancholia", "Anti-Christ" etc), "Creation" is sensitive, touching, doesn't resort to kitschy aesthetic strategies, and conveys well the quiet turmoil which accompanies such depressing periods. The film co-stars a miscast Jennifer Connelly as Darwin's wife, a woman who watches as her husband cuts himself off from his family and slips further and further into his own morbid thoughts.
"Creation" works well as a kind of existential chamber play; think Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" with a dollop of science. It's also elevated by a good script by John Collee. Unfortunately director Jon Amiel is mostly a hack – though this remains his best work – and the film ultimately rushes through, and so does a disservice to, Darwin's real life-story. Every inch of Darwin's life, after all, was rich and endlessly fascinating, from his oceanic adventures, to his conflicts with his father, to his explorations of South America, to his life aboard the HMS Beagle, to the colorful scientists, artists, royals, tribesmen and seamen he met, to his relationship with his captain, the great Robert Fitzroy (a pioneer in his own right), to his military skirmishes, to his role in various political coups, and of course to his contributions to science and philosophy. The political situation in England during Darwin's time was also fascinating – a period rocked by much social unrest, riots, and squabbles between parliament, labour and capital – a political situation which only made Darwin's relationship with Fitzroy all the more cool. Fitzroy was a Tory, Christian, conservative and relative to royals. Darwin, in contrast, was a Whig, liberal and relative of notable scientists (Erasmus Darwin et al) and abolitionists. The duo would have many riveting discussions, often about religion, science, slavery, class struggles and morality, and both rubbed off on one another, intellectually and physically (the Beagle was tiny), in fascinating ways. Fitzroy would commit suicide shortly after Darwin published "Species", his dear friend's findings allegedly pushing him into depression and spurring him to drive a blade into his neck.
Incidentally, "Creation's" release coincided with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. That same year, the British Council conducted a poll surveying attitudes about Darwin around the world. To the question, "is there scientific evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution?" 77% of Indians, 72% of Chinese and 65% of Mexicans answered yes; only 41% of Americans did. The film struggled to find a US distributer.
8/10 - See "The Voyage of Charles Darwin" (1978).
