We’ll expand these quotes as reaction evolves. In the beginning, there was THR:
Collee and director Amiel move seamlessly back and forth from the lovely times when Annie (Martha West) was the apple of her father’s eye to the present as he is wracked with writer’s block and the fear that by writing his book, he will lose the love of his deeply religious wife.
Thanks to the writing, pacing and Bettany’s nuanced performance, it is one of the best delineations of intellectual and emotional struggle seen on film in many a year. The actor’s scenes with Annie and Emma have an extraordinary tenderness that grips the heart just as Darwin’s scientific dilemma engages the brain. West is unaffected and winning as the girl, and Connelly, with a perfect English accent, shows the wife’s anguish as well as her undying loyalty.
Variety predicts “respectable critical support,” but its own critic’s entusiam is subdued:
Amiel, demonstrating some of the visual panache more creatively deployed in earlier work (“Queen of Hearts,” the “Singing Detective” mini) than later genre projects “The Core” or “Entrapment,” finds opportunities to illustrate theories of natural selection and such in brief montages, sometimes deploying digital and time-lapse effects. But despite that and pleasant (if modestly scaled) period trappings, “Creation” feels somewhat static in storytelling terms. Once basic conflicts are established, we simply wait for Darwin to come to terms with his grief, marriage and imminent notoriety. Not much “happens,” though the pic does its best to maintain energy in both physical presentation and mixed-chronology structure.
