Toronto Film Festival, Day 2

I'm still easing into the schedule; just 3 today.

CREATION, directed by Jon Amiel, England

For all the attention and intense debate that Charles Darwin has stirred and still stirs 125 years after his death, we(or at least I) don't know much about who he was. Creation may go a little way toward filling in that gap, but just a little. I hope it inspires a few articles about him that are more rational than this film.

It's not that creation is irrational. But it is an ironically romantic portrait of a man for whom reason/rationality was his principal tool. Pitted against a widespread approach to scientific issues rooted in religion and scripture -- what we now call creationism -- the film's Darwin wages a lonely battle for a more rational, observational methodology. Even his loving wife has deep religious reservations about his work. This drives them into a fevered psychosomatic physical decline, which he self-medicates with laudanum. When his oldest daughter and most faithful disciple (she's about 12) falls gravely ill, the benighted medical establishment prescribes either mercury or bleeding. He opts for experimental treatments that apparently include colonic irrigation and torrential cold showers. That treatment restores him to working order, but it can't save his daughter. That renders her a ghost, whom the film's Darwin engages in fevered debates and pursues fruitlessly down a number of twisting Victorian alleys, much like the red-clad dead child in Don't Look Now.

This ghostly presence and her influence on Darwin's intellectual productivity form the most incongruous element of an otherwise pretty impressive film. Paul Bettany maintains a remarkably focused portrayal of an extremely complex character, holding on to the human core of Darwin as the film jumps around in time and in and out of reality. Jennifer Connelly is even more impressive is Emma Darwin, devout Christian and devoted wife. She makes the conflicts of this woman quietly, painfully clear. A number of more or less familiar British character actors provide solid support. it is a beautiful production, elegantly designed and shot, with some remarkable time lapse photography, and some ickily impressive nature shots. Although these sequences magnificently illustrate "survival of the fittest", they still require the film to assure us that they did not result in any harm to the animals being photographed. That, I think, would have really puzzled Darwin. The movie might have too, as it occasionally did me. But its ambition, and the thoughtful substantive debate that it incorporates, along with with the excellent production values, make it an admirable achievement.

I rate it a B+