Creation

Little known facts about Charles Darwin:

1. Few people know that Darwin was addicted to cherry flavoured Halls Soothers. Apparently he saw the advert with the woman having her neck kissed in a lift and thought he give them a go. Now he's on ten packets a day.

2. Darwin's nickname at school was "Ugly Chris", as other children believed that he resembled a slightly less aesthetically pleasing version of football player, pundit and legend Chris Kamara.

3. Darwin's first daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten from scarlet fever, though some believe that she suffered from tuberculosis. Often considered to be Darwin's favourite of his children, her death was a huge blow to Charles and his wife Emma. Darwin wrote later in a personal memoir: "Oh that she could know how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face."

Alright. Two of those facts are dubious. I found them on the back of a toilet door at Warwick services (which, by the way, has improved immensely since it installed the M&S Simply Food). But the third is solid fact. And how do I know? Because CREATION, the new film directed by Jon Amiel, and starring real-life husband and wife team Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly as Darwins Charles and Emma, told me so.

The slow-moving and contemplative story follows a young and handsome Darwin (not the bearded and cumbersome figure that we are used to seeing) as he struggles to deal with the pressures of life; of the demand on him to finish his most famous work 'On The Origin Of Species', of an illness that has been affecting him for months, of his battle with those who oppose his radical anti-creationist views, and of his strained and dysfunctional marriage to Emma, whose devotion to the church is built like a concrete wall between them. What's more, Charles is visited on regular occasions by the ghost of Annie, his deceased daughter and one his biggest fans, and it is this that troubles him the most; his sadness at the loss of his beloved child but also the anger and guilt that he feels towards the way in which she died, and the part that he himself had to play in the event.

With a fantastic central performance by Bettany, by far and away a career best, leading the way, Creation is satisfyingly engrossing and heartfelt for much of its 108 minutes. Written with flair and structurally challenging, it does well to take an otherwise tired period genre and inject a sense of real darkness and a journey of real emotional turmoil. Amiel's direction does at times take the dreamy visions a bit too far, and there is a bizarre circle-of-life sequence somewhere in the films middle that sticks out like a sore thumb, but otherwise the film is very nicely balanced between costume drama and modern character study.

What is important to note if you are thinking of going to see this film is that it is NOT, as I believed and as others will be convinced as well, a sparring session between the two eternally opposed camps of Darwinism and creationism (or even science and religion, if you were to go so far as to reduce them to that...).

What I really appreciated about the film, and about Amiel's handling of the subject matter, was that it could, in the wrong hands, have become a banner-waving, my dad's bigger than your dad, finger-pointing in the face of modern creationist thinkers. It is not, as you might expect, cinema as a vehicle for personal or political motive. This is not Michael Moore, and is clearly better for it. Instead it is a captivating, mature and intelligent study of one of history's most important men, one who's research and writing transcends the boundaries of modern influence, but also a man who, despite his almost otherworldly grasp of science, was just as loving and passionate, as fragile and vulnerable as any other.

There are no great surprises in Creation, and it closes with a well-played and pleasingly different moment of catharsis for both Darwin and his wife, followed by a predictably uplifting and inspiring ending, but the appeal of the film is that it gives much more weight to the survival of the human spirit, the survival of Darwin himself, than the survival of the fittest. With good turns from Connolly and Jeremy Northam, who plays a sort of antagonist as local church man Reverend Innes, along with a wonderful cameo from Jenny the orangutan, Creation stands out this week as a good, honest piece of film-making. Simple, yes, but perfectly designed for its function.