Paul Bettany struggles through the genius of Charles Darwin in the same way that Russell Crowe depicted the troubled life of John Forbes Nash, Jr. in A Beautiful Mind. Here, in Creation, Darwin's wrestling match with On the Origin of Species is highlighted by his relationship with his daughter Annie (Martha West) and his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly, Bettany's real-life wife). Darwin's fated decision to throw his thoughts, his name, and (to some) his soul out there for public discussion gets dramatized with the additional fleshing out of his life that Jon Amiel (Sommersby, Entrapment) provides by way of direction.

Surprisingly (again, to some) I wasn't extremely offended by the context and plot of the film, or of the ideas that Bettany's Darwin presents. There's a crucial scene where Thomas Henry Huxley (Toby Jones) tells Darwin that he's killed God, an inscrutable dictator, but Joseph Dalton Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch) isn't quite sure that's what Darwin's theory proposes. What one will have to get straight in one's own head prior to the movie is whether or not you think Darwin's evolution is micro or macro, and whether or not the movie ever gets them straight. Either way, you might get upset (I didn't) but that's because I don't think you can explain away creation in a treatise or completely discount evolution from a scriptural perspective.

What is quite obvious is the ability of the married Bettany and Connelly to work together and to pull off the dynamics of a genius thinker at home and at work. It's quite wild to consider that they are both granted a real "voice" here: I don't think either dominates, even though Bettany gets more screen time as he plays the tortured soul who struggles with his own fabric of reality, the tension between his observations and belief in things unseen. Bettany definitely does a good job, and his role as the suffering (and later grieving) father also adds a piece to what we see of Darwin and how we might perceive his outpouring of ideas.

I am not enough of a Darwinism expert to agree or disagree with points, or to highlight where dramatic license was taken. I will say that the movie does a good job of raising moral and emotional tension, of presenting ideas without getting bogged down with them, and with providing the people involved the opportunity to speak for themselves. It's a case study that's also entertainment: will you choose to wrestle with the big questions or will you just allow things to push and pull you in whichever direction they are going? Darwin struggles, yes, but in the end, he makes up his own mind, and no matter what, we're called to use our heart, our soul, our mind, and our body to love God with everything we've got.

Can you love God fully if you're not wrestling with the big questions?