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"Director: Jon Amiel Screenwriters: John Collee Starring: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martha West Running time: 108 mins Certificate: PG Paul Bettany gets under the skin of Charles Darwin in Creation, the portrait of an extraordinary man who defied the word of God with his theory of evolution. Though it&amp;#039;s been 150 years since he published On The Origin of Species (the film also marks the bicentenary of his birth) his ideas are still deemed too inflammatory in America where the film has struggled to find a distributor. And yet, director Jon Amiel skates over this epic clash of ideologies, using it only as a backdrop to Darwin&amp;#039;s inner conflict while he procrastinates over writing the book. It&amp;#039;s a boldly small approach to a big subject and, except for Bettany&amp;#039;s performance, it feels miscalculated. Amiel flashes back and forth between the two most critical periods in Darwin&amp;#039;s life: writing his theory of evolution and prior to that, watching the demise of his daughter Annie (Martha West). Of course the more Darwin writes, the less room there is for the comfort of believing that he&amp;#039;ll one day be reunited with Annie in heaven. That creates a mental block which only seems more impassable because his wife (played by Bettany&amp;#039;s real-life spouse Jennifer Connelly) depends on her faith to carry her through the grieving process. What Amiel neglects to show (working from a script by Bergerac scribe John Collee) is how all this affects his standing in the wider community. It&amp;#039;s left to Jeremy Northam to represent all of 19th century Western society playing Reverend Inness; a thinly drawn character. He is predictably pompous, verging on the villainous when - in a flashback - he forces Darwin&amp;#039;s precious little Annie to kneel on rock salt for challenging a Bible story. Simplifying the battle between science and religion with such clich\u00C3\u00A9s actually weakens the film and even Connelly is short-changed by this formula. It&amp;#039;s a testament to how talented she is that she (just about) remains sympathetic as she drifts about the house like she&amp;#039;s riding a broomstick on the vertical, stopping only to espouse the virtues of going to church. When Darwin starts talking to his dead daughter, they accuse him of madness, but the implication is always that he is more sane than everyone else in the room. Amiel is more at home with the domestic melodrama (he also directed Jodie Foster and Richard Gere in Sommersby) and he profits the natural rapport between Bettany and Connelly, but the dynamic between Darwin and his dead daughter throws the film completely off kilter. It morphs from historical drama into an odd little PG-rated ghost story with surreal flourishes. Blackbirds flap around Darwin like bloodthirsty bats and jarred specimens come to life in his nightmares, but it all seems like a desperate attempt to combat the staleness. At times, this film is more like a pretentious stage play. Darwin&amp;#039;s conversations with his dead daughter are a clumsy device to demonstrate his inner turmoil and that&amp;#039;s not helped by the fact that the dialogue is as subtly crafted as a full-body dissection by a supermarket butcher. Amid all this chaos, Bettany manages to hold on to his dignity, delivering a finely turned performance, but alas, that&amp;#039;s just not enough to save the rest of Creation.  &amp;gt; What do you think of the movie? Share your views "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a177891/creation/>