BEFORE: I bought a new DVD recorder the other day, so I'm on my third one now. I guess I'm a little rough on them, they tend wear out after 3 or 4 years. The VHS deck on the last one broke two years ago, but I kept using the DVD burner, dubbing in the signal from another VCR. With the hundreds of DVDs I've made, at least I got my money's worth. I put the new one right to work getting the James Bond films on DVD, though I won't be able to watch them until next year.
From Charles Lindbergh to Charles Darwin - just two famous people with movies made about them. Lindbergh has his own thoughts on eugenics, and of course Darwin concerned himself with evolution. Tough to find an acting link, but Jimmy Stewart voiced a character in "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West", along with John Cleese, who was also in the remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" with Jennifer Connelly (last heard in "9").
THE PLOT: English naturalist Charles Darwin struggles to find a balance between his revolutionary theories on evolution and the relationship with religious wife, whose faith contradicts his work.
AFTER: Well, if I took "The Spirit of St. Louis" to task for its use of flashbacks, then I have to criticize this one as well, for excessive jumping around in time, a.k.a. non-linear storytelling. You can't really call these "flashbacks", it's more like 2 narrative timelines playing out concurrently, one in the older past and one in the present - or more accurately, the more recent past. One timeline shows Darwin as a caring, hands-on father, and the other as an ailing, more distant man. The dividing point is a family tragedy, an intense personal loss.
In one case, we see the older Darwin remembering a day at the beach with his daughter, when he tells her a story about his encounter with an orangutang, which we then also see play out. So, a flashback within a flashback - is this "Creation" or "Inception"?
Again, I struggle with this kind of storytelling, especially when it's done to be "arty" or "trendy", or used to make simple connections between two storylines that I, as an audience member, should have been able to make on my own. It's like the filmmaker doesn't trust me to see the echoes of one storyline in another, so those similar events have to be placed right next to each other, because someone is assuming that all of the viewers are idiots.
Or perhaps it's done to cover up a weak story - who wants to see scene after scene of a man who's having a tough time struggling with illness while deciding whether to publish his scientific findings? It's not very cinematic, this decision-making process - but then, neither is the act of writing. Whatever the instrument - quill pen, typewriter, or laptop - nothing slows down a movie like watching a character write. Ah, but if we drop in a scene from earlier in the man's life, like an eventful family outing, that will keep people entertained.
Here's my advice to writers - if you've got a weak story outline, no amount of time-jumping is going to help. You'll just get a weak movie with the events told in the wrong order. When you realize you've got a weak subject, throw the paper in the bin (be sure to crumple it first, I'm not sure why) and start again with a more interesting subject.
There might even have been an interesting subject here, but it feels like they came at it from the wrong angle - Charles Darwin, family man? OK, that's an interesting subplot, admittedly it's not a side of him that most people know about. But if you want to show what inspired his book "The Origin of Species", why not show him doing the research? Traveling to the Galapagos Islands, finding giant turtles and examining finches. Dealing with the natives, living on a ship, far from home. You know, the stuff that the book was actually about. I would watch that film.
The only stuff here that I did find interesting, and it's not all that cinematic either, was Darwin's agonizing over the effect that his book might have on religion. He seemed to be caught in the middle between the scientists who wanted him to publish to dispel creationism, and his more religious wife, who was concerned for his soul if his work did turn out to be in conflict with the church. It seemed like Darwin had given up on religion, but then how can a marriage survive when two people have such different beliefs?
As a recovering Catholic myself, I can see it's no fun to be stuck there - when you're agnostic and surrounded by people who seem to be believers, it does seem like everyone is somehow delusional. If you buy into the Bible then you've got to buy into heaven and halos and harps, and this fairy story that everyone who dies goes to live on a cloud somewhere. And then maybe you start to ask questions about whether animals have souls, and where exactly heaven is, and how you get there, and who determines whether you get in, and you realize all the answers we have to those questions were written by imperfect people, and the whole business just starts to unravel. Science tells us the simplest explanation is usually right (the conservation of bullshit theory, I believe) so why don't more people believe that when you die, it's over? Doesn't it make life that much more precious? Doesn't it make you want to make the best out of whatever time you have left?
Darwin saw the big picture - he saw that whatever the species, life is a struggle, and only the strong survive, until they don't. Animals and humans didn't evolve quickly, but over millions of years, with lots of false starts and dead-ends - and that everything is part of the natural order, everything eats and gets eaten. Everyone begins and ends - humans are just a bit more aware of the process, that's all. But religion is something of a distraction, something to keep our minds off our fates so we can go accomplish something of perceived value. And that's the sad, terrible, beautiful truth as I see it.
Also starring Paul Bettany (last heard in "The Avengers"), Martha West, Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Other Boleyn Girl"), Toby Jones (last seen in "W").
RATING: 4 out of 10 cold showers
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