Creation

No one can object to the BBC and the UK Film Council producing period dramas. They do them very well. Like the Royal Family, they are a defining element of being English. Others are love of animals and a belief in good education. Creation shows them all when it takes us off to meet Charles Darwin in his Victorian era. He and Mrs Darwin are acted by Paul Bettany and his real-life wife (Jennifer Connelly).

Director Jon Amiel, whose ground-breaking work for BBC TV's The Singing Detective led him to Hollywood, turns in a movie that looks grand. It sounds less imposing because its screenplay fails, almost inevitably, in the tough task of presenting Darwin's long-delayed and arduous writing of The Origin of the Species in dramatic and cinematic terms. Darwin's health and marriage may have been failing to recover from the death of his first daughter, but that's a melodramatic ploy rather than a critical plot detail.

Darwin's theory of evolution shook the 19th-Century world, and Connelly struggles to convey conventional God-fearing reactions to her husband's ideas about natural selection and the non-existence of God as a seven-day creative wonder. Darwin himself was sorely troubled by the realisation where his review of facts of nature was leading him; Bettany merely sickens and ages.

The movie is a finely-costumed, well-photographed history lesson. It could be a useful schoolroom primer, as Thomas Huxley (Toby Young), the local vicar (Jeremy Northam) and other contemporaries have conversations rich in quotable comments about God, apes and archbishops, science and love.

Bettany and Connelly may have known what their latest joint project lacked: they first worked together on A Beautiful Mind, a movie which did manage to make its audience sense the angst and agony of intellectual life.