Creation (1 Viewer)

[Scott]

We watched this one last night. The Royal Marines at Tierra del Fuego shot got my attention as the uniforms were off by a few years so I rented the film from NETFLIX. Not a BIG movie but pretty good with some of the cast members of Young Victoria and Amazing Grace. Cute kid as Annie Darwin. (My daughter liked her) Nice location shots. Costumes not high fashion but period looking and as with British films, the characters look like they belong in them. Some good bonus features and commentary.

 

[PolarBear]

Scott

Annie Darwin is Martha West the daughter of Dominic West, officer McNulty of HBO's The Wire.

So I guess the gothic ghost story flavor of Creation did not bother you as much as it did me?

Randy

 

[Scott]

The "Hydro-therapist" explained the ghosts. Maybe it was Darwin coming down off the Laudanum as well.The movie did kind of substitute God with the ghost of his daughter. I understand that when people have religious visions, they usually see beings from their own religion rather than someone else's. That would make sense with Darwin seeing Annie first over any Christian being.

I was watching the movie with the commentary and the scenes with the Orangutan were pretty amazing for what they got with an untrained animal.

 

[PolarBear]

The "Hydro-therapist" explained the ghosts. Maybe it was Darwin coming down off the Laudanum as well.The movie did kind of substitute God with the ghost of his daughter. I understand that when people have religious visions, they usually see beings from their own religion rather than someone else's. That would make sense with Darwin seeing Annie first over any Christian being.

I was watching the movie with the commentary and the scenes with the Orangutan were pretty amazing for what they got with an untrained animal.

I plan to re-watch it with the commentary and check out the features. Since I have a good size Darwin research collection I bought Creation on sale at Borders. Bettany does look a lot like Darwin at that age. I thought Jennifer Connelly looked rather anorexic, although Emma was slender.

 

[PolarBear]

Another review:


Creation
Charles Darwin's inner turmoil is laid bare in a subtle and persuasive biopic, says Philip French

In the year in which we're celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, it's a pity that no one has mounted a season of movies touching on his life and work. The centrepiece would be Jon Amiel's admirable if somewhat mistitled Creation, adapted by the novelist, doctor and former Observer medical correspondent John Collee from Randal Keynes's book Annie's Box.

It could begin in a lighthearted vein with the Marx Brothers' movie Horse Feathers (1932), which starts with Groucho being appointed president of Huxley College and ends with him playing in a survival-of-the-fittest football match with the rival Darwin College. Then there would be the simple but ambitious British movie The Darwin Adventure (1972) that in a breathtaking 90 minutes takes in Darwin's career-shaping, five-year voyage on the Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands, the seminal discoveries that lead to his theory of evolution, his conflict with Captain Fitzroy, the Beagle's God-fearing skipper, his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, his problems in producing his classic book and the epoch-making debate it provoked.

This could be followed by the excellent film version of AS Byatt's novella Angels & Insects (1995), about the effect of the industrial revolution and the ideas of Darwin on the inhabitants of a grand Victorian country household. The next film would be Inherit the Wind (1960), Stanley Kramer's earnest, heavy film of the Broadway play currently being revived at the Old Vic, centring on the Dayton Monkey Trial in backwoods Tennessee in 1925. In this courtroom where a schoolmaster is on trial for teaching evolution, the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow confronts the fundamentalist politician and one-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, virtually replaying the Oxford debate between Darwin's chief 1860 advocate TH Huxley and the Church of England's stalwart Bishop Wilberforce.

After Inherit the Wind, a little intelligent levity might be introduced by a screening of Peter Weir's nautical adventure Master and Commander (2003) featuring Paul Bettany as the naturalist and cerebral surgeon of the HMS Surprise, Stephen Maturin, who managed while fighting the French in 1805 to put into the Galapagos, the film's only landfall, and conduct research that wittily and cheekily foreshadows Darwin's discoveries there some 30 years later. This would bring us to Creation, a quiet, subtle chamber work starring a persuasively inward-looking Bettany as Darwin and largely set in Darwin's fine country home in Kent in the late 1850s.

He's not the archetypal, heavily bearded Victorian sage he became in his later years. He's a clean-shaven man in his late 40s, neurotic, melancholic, guilt-ridden, troubled in mind and body as so many intelligent, sensitive, middle-class professional people were in a time supposedly devoted to the idea of robust, muscular Christianity preached by Dr Arnold of Rugby.

He feels guilty over what the propagation of his ideas may do to conventional beliefs and organised society, over the rift they're creating with his protective, deeply Christian wife (Jennifer Connelly) and what he sees, absurdly, as his responsibility for the death seven years earlier of their bright 10-year-old daughter Annie (a sparkling performance of intellectual eagerness and filial devotion by Martha West).

Annie is a central figure in the process by which Darwin comes to terms with his ideas, their delivery to the world and their likely consequences. She's untainted by social conventions and received beliefs and closer to him than to her mother. In flashbacks, he turns his work during the Beagle expedition and with the orang-utan Jenny into bedtime stories for her and later for her brothers and sisters. Annie understands his revolutionary interpretation of existence, because she looks clearly at the world around her. When she returns to him as a ghost, this is not that traditionally consoling Hollywood figure, the heavenly visitor, but the embodiment of the humanistic notion of the dead remaining alive in the minds of the living.

There is a lively intervention from the outside world when his allies, the aggressive Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) and the diplomatic Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch), drop in on Darwin to stir him into publishing his book. Apart from the moment when the family cook knocks on the great man's study door saying: "Come along, Mr Darwin, your dinner's getting cold", this is the closest the film comes to a 1930s Warner Brothers type of conventional biopic.

Otherwise, it's a complex, truthful work that does justice to Darwin's theories and their implications. Particular attention is given to books and learned papers at a time when scientific advance came from individual research conducted privately, rather than, as now, done by teams working for institutions.

Seeing Darwin writing with pen and ink and his loving wife eventually sending off his manuscript to the publisher, we think of the power of the word and the individual mind, an activity examined by Stanley Edgar Hyman in his neglected classic The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. It was ultimately through the power of their prose that those great thinkers impressed their ideas upon a larger public.

But the battle of ideas goes on. We entered the 21st century with a British prime minister who came to countenance creationism and he was joined by a US president who endorsed it. Creation, a carefully reasoned movie that places close to its centre an intelligent, reasoning child, struggled to find an American distributor.

If you have not seen Angels & Insects mentioned above it is worth a viewing. Unfortunately currently not available from Netflix

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_&_Insects

 

[PolarBear]

Scott

Here are 2 Darwin books that you may not have run across: Darwin was pro-North during the ACW and his wife's family (the Wedgwoods) were active in the anti-slavery movement.

 

[Scott]

Some have tried to claim Darwin was racist because of his use of racial terms also used by just about everyone else at the time. He has been entirely misquoted for the term "superior races" when he was referring to plants and animals in "Origins." Voyage of the Beagle has incidents in Brazil where Darwin was describing local people accurately as a naturalist would that read as racist today. His opinion of slavery, where he personally saw it in action, leaves no doubt that he was against it and had empathy for the slaves.


"I may mention one very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty. I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal." -- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Chapter II.."



I'd like to see Voyage of the Beagle as a movie with a big budget and CGI for the natural disasters!

 

[PolarBear]

Scott

This NYT review supports your comments. I own the Gopnik as well as the Desmond and Moore book.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Benfey-t.html?pagewanted=print

Randy