Paul Bettany & Jennifer Connelly

The difficulty of taking on the biography of a man of science is so often the science itself, which entails hours of observation, painstaking notes, endless experimentation and much deep thinking.

Still, in Charles Darwin's case, considering his "On the Origin of Species" would forever change how we view our very existence, you'd hope for a little high drama from filmmaker Jon Amiel's "Creation."

Instead there is angst, lots of it, for Paul Bettany to muck around in as he portrays the great evolutionist. Not that angst is bad, but here it makes a muddle of Darwin's story. Even the sheer beauty of the setting and the attention to detail in re-creating his family life in a bucolic English village in the 1850s is not enough of a distraction, though it is a reminder of Amiel's long history with period pieces, "Sommersby" probably the best known here.

Initially, Charles and his family -- Bettany's significant other, Jennifer Connelly, portrays Darwin's wife, Emma -- seem to live an enchanted life, with dad turning his scientific observations of other cultures and species into grand stories for the children, of which there will eventually be 10, though only seven survive into adulthood.

For the Darwin brood, a trip to the shore turns into a home-schooling adventure on how the strata of rocks are created; a walk in the forest with the sight of a fox catching a rabbit is cause for a survival-of-the-fittest lesson.

But when dad starts talking about explorations of more primitive places and peoples, suddenly the action shifts to jungles and distant shores, which might be OK if that were the only time-traveling we would be doing. It is not, because of daughter Annie.

The precocious and much-loved Annie Darwin (a very promising young Martha West) died at 10 of a fever after going through treatment that seems reminiscent of waterboarding, but then, it was the 1800s. Charles, who already had bouts of an undiagnosed illness that looks a lot like depression, was sent into a deep tailspin.

Before long, Charles and an afterlife Annie are having lots of philosophical conversations as he worries that his thesis will kill the notion of God and other thorny issues, particularly since wife Emma is especially devout.

Soon you realize that Annie's death has sent the director into a tailspin of his own. With his allegiance divided between father and daughter, it becomes increasingly difficult to know to whom the film really belongs.

You can almost see screenwriter John Collee's struggle to adapt the book "Annie's Box," by one of Darwin's descendants, Randal Keynes. Try as he might to work three narrative threads -- Charles' present day, which is as concerned with his personal demons as his science; his past; and his ongoing conversations with an afterlife Annie -- into a coherent piece, "Creation" never really gels.

 

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"Creation" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some intense thematic material).

Running time: 1:48.

Cast: Paul Bettany (Charles Darwin); Jennifer Connelly (Emma Darwin); Jeremy Northam (Reverend Innes); Toby Jones (Thomas Huxley); Benedict Cumberbatch (Joseph Hooker); Martha West (Annie Darwin).

Credits: Directed by Jon Amiel; written by John Collee, from the book "Annie's Box" by Randal Keynes; produced by Jeremy Thomas. A Newmarket Films release.