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Darwin's Darkest Hour (120 min.; dir. John Bradshaw; 2009). With Henry Ian Cusick, Nigel Bennett, Jeremy Akerman, Frances O'Connor. Scripted by John Goldsmith. Nova and National Geographic Television; aired October 6, 2009, PBS.
Creation (108 min.; dir. Jon Amiel; 2009). With Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly. Scripted by John Collee. Recorded Picture Company.
Darwin's Darkest Hour, a two-hour documentary-drama, was produced by Nova in association with National Geographic Television to show the development of Charles Darwin's evolutionary views in historical and domestic context. Unlike all the other TV documentaries that were released in 2009 to commemorate Darwin's bicentenary year, this is offered as a historical drama in full period costume. The script and the action are intended to carry the storyline with little further ado: there are no talking heads, no explanatory voice-overs. Issues of faith, scientific credibility, ambition, and research are handled as natural elements of the story. This reviewer has to declare an interest in that I read the script at an early stage of development. Even so, I do feel that this is well done. The documentary is a pleasure to watch, the main threads are easy to understand, the historical structure does not stand in the way of our emotional engagement with the characters, and there are some very nice moments that work extremely well indeed. The cast is excellent, especially the outstanding Darwin (Henry Ian Cusick). Their words are mostly taken from letters and diaries, discreetly updated.
The program sticks as close as it can to the facts. It recreates for viewers the crucial few weeks in 1858 when Darwin decided he must make his ideas public. That moment has always been noted as a dramatic one, full of cinematographic potential. The screenwriter John Goldsmith frames the story around Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of the idea of evolution by natural selection. A letter penned by Wallace, the young English naturalist (Rhys Bevan-John), sets the drama in motion. Wallace is suffering from malaria, alone among his exotic natural history collections, located somewhere unspecified in the Malaysian forest. In this letter Wallace enclosed a short and brilliantly incisive essay describing his own theory of evolution by natural selection. As Goldsmith says in an online interview, "It's kind of like a spear...