Great to see hoft again. May we see more in the future? They are making a movie of Darwinis life. Doubt that the picture will come out.
September 8, 2009, 9:30 pm
The Creation of Charles Darwin
In case you missed it, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, “On the Origin of Species.” Already, there have been exhibitions and lectures, television documentaries and radio shows, postage stamps and playing cards. Books have been published on every aspect of the man, his work and his life. You can sample his wife’s recipes (orange posset, anyone?), read about his garden, experience Patagonia through his eyes and employ an “evolutionary hermeneutic” to see how he influenced writers like William Faulkner. If that’s not your thing, you can recite Darwin-inspired poetry and peruse any number of tracts with titles like “Why Evolution is True.” What fun.
And the fat lady has not yet evolved: there’s still much to look forward to. Kevin Spacey and David Troughton are about to appear in a new London production of “Inherit the Wind”, a play about the 1920’s Scopes “monkey” trial, which put a school teacher in Tennessee in the dock for teaching evolution. And on Thursday this week, the Toronto International Film Festival opens with a gala presentation of the world premiere of “Creation,” the first full-length film about Darwin for the big screen. It’s directed by Jon Amiel, and Paul Bettany plays Darwin; Bettany’s real-life wife, Jennifer Connelly, plays Darwin’s wife Emma. Unlike Charles and Emma, however, Connelly and Bettany are not first cousins.
The script of “Creation” is based on a book called “Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution,” by Randal Keynes. Keynes is one of Darwin’s great-great-grandsons. His book is thus part-biography, part-family memoir.
Charles DarwinWikipedia Portrait of Charles Darwin by George Richmond
Unlike most biographies of Darwin, its central event is not the publication of the “Origin,” but the death of Darwin’s adored eldest daughter, Annie, at the age of 10. She died in 1851 after nine months of a mysterious illness; at the time of her death, she was not at home, but in the English spa town of Malvern, where she had been sent for treatment.
Annie’s death is also the central event of this beautifully shot film. For “Creation” is not a didactic film: its main aim is not the public understanding of Darwin’s ideas, but a portrait of a bereaved man and his family. The man just happens to be one of the most important thinkers in human history.
Which isn’t to say that Darwin’s ideas don’t feature. We see him dissecting barnacles, preparing pigeon skeletons, meeting pigeon breeders and talking to scientific colleagues. He visits the London zoo, where he plays a mouth organ to Jenny, an orangutan; at home, he takes notes on Annie as a baby (Does she laugh? Does she recognize herself in the mirror?). He teaches his children about geology and beetles, makes them laugh with tales of his adventures in South America, and shows them how to walk silently in a forest so as to sneak up on wild animals.
At the same time, we see his view of nature " a wasteful, cruel, violent place, where wasps lay their eggs in the living flesh of caterpillars, chicks fall from the nest and die of starvation, and the fox kills and eats the rabbit.
But all this is merely the backdrop to the story of a man convulsed by grief.
Charles and Emma had ten children, of whom seven survived into adulthood. Their third child, Mary, died within a month of birth, and their tenth, Charles Waring, before the age of two. (Charles Waring was born when Emma was 48.) Both these deaths were upsetting.
But Annie’s death was far worse. She was older when she died, and as Darwin wrote to a friend after her death, “She was my favourite child; her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness & strong affection made her most loveable.”
After her death, Darwin wrote a few pages in remembrance of her, but seems never to have mentioned her again, except in letters of condolence to friends who had lost children. In 1863, he wrote to one, “I understand well your words, ‘Wherever I go she is there.’”
Yet though he didn’t speak of her, her death was not without impact on his thinking. According to Darwin’s biographer Janet Browne, “This death was the formal beginning of Darwin’s conscious dissociation from believing in the traditional figure of God. The doctrines of the Bible that Emma took comfort in were hurdles he could not jump.”
Darwin also worried that he was somehow to blame for Annie’s death. His own health was rotten. (In the index of Browne’s biography, the entry for “Darwin, Charles, ill health of” occupies 5 percent of the “Darwin, Charles” entries " more than any other single item.) He feared that Annie had died because of a “hereditary weakness,” perhaps made worse because her parents were cousins. Later in his life, Darwin attempted to have a question about cousin marriage added to the national census, but the idea was rejected by parliament.
“Creation” thus takes on two main themes. The first is the difference in religious outlook between Darwin and his wife " and, more broadly, between Darwin and much of Victorian society. This is inevitable in any account of Darwin’s life. The second, and more unusual, theme is the mental hell of guilt and anguish that the death of a loved one can bring, and how that can fracture a family.
Bettany plays a man haunted by his dead daughter " a powerful performance perhaps inspired by the fact he himself lost a young brother when he was a teenager. Bettany’s Darwin sees the ghost of his daughter in his study, in the garden: wherever he goes, she is there. The ghost chides her father for being a coward and not getting on with his work on the “Origin.” She is also destructive, taking Darwin away from his living children and his wife.
It’s a disturbing interpretation. Charles Darwin is supposed to be a symbol of rational thought, not a character subject to a kind of Shakespearean insanity. But it seems plausible. Death can be a powerful force; the death of a child especially so; and Darwin was an emotional man.
Pedants will find things to quibble about. We’re given the impression, for instance, that Darwin returns to Malvern before he writes the “Origin” and has a catharsis in the room where Annie died; in fact, he didn’t return to Malvern until several years after the “Origin” was published.
But to pick at such things misses the point. Too often, Darwin is depicted as a kind of fossil: an old man with a huge beard looking as though he’s 350. It’s refreshing to see him looking young and handsome; indeed, Bettany manages to look astonishingly like the portrait of the young Darwin. And more to the point, Bettany shows Darwin as a man rather than icon, imbuing him with life and love, gentleness and anxiety, tears and laughter. This alone makes it an important film.
