“Creation” the film – trailer by sahil

Charles Darwin's inner turmoil is laid bare in a subtle and persuasive biopic, says Philip French.
In the year in which we're celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, it's a pity that no one has mounted a season of movies touching on his life and work. The centerpiece would be Jon Amiel's admirable if somewhat mistitled Creation, adapted by the novelist, doctor and former Observer medical correspondent John Collee from Randal Keynes's book Annie's Box.

It could begin in a lighthearted vein with the Marx Brothers' movie Horse Feathers (1932), which starts with Groucho being appointed president of Huxley College and ends with him playing in a survival-of-the-fittest football match with the rival Darwin College. Then there would be the simple but ambitious British movie The Darwin Adventure (1972) that in a breathtaking 90 minutes takes in Darwin's career-shaping, five-year voyage on the Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands, the seminal discoveries that lead to his theory of evolution, his conflict with Captain Fitzroy, the Beagle's God-fearing skipper, his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, his problems in producing his classic book and the epoch-making debate it provoked.