Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) bonds with the orangutan Jenny at London Zoo in a scene from Creation. (Recorded Picture Company/D Films) If Charles Dickens had written about his contemporary, Charles Darwin, he might've come up with something like Creation. Jon Amiel's noble but sentimental Darwin biopic is filled with Dickensian tropes: a dying child, a distraught father, a sadistic schoolmaster, an instructive ghost.

It's all in the service of showing us the human side of the author of On the Origin of Species, the keystone text of evolutionary theory that remains controversial thanks to religious fundamentalists. The film is strenuous proof that the scientific genius who wrote of the survival of the fittest was himself a gentle, compassionate man – the very opposite of what is commonly thought of as "Darwinian."

This film is strenuous proof that the scientific genius who wrote of the survival of the fittest was himself a gentle, compassionate man – the very opposite of 'Darwinian.'

Creation is inspired by Annie's Box, the moving 2002 book by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes, which revealed how much the loss of Darwin's beloved oldest daughter influenced his crisis of faith. The film opens in 1858, seven years after the death of 10-year-old Annie Darwin, when her aging, ailing father is feverishly struggling to complete the long-gestating Origin.

Darwin, played superbly by Paul Bettany, is greatly troubled. He knows his revolutionary work goes against the teachings of the church – as pugnacious fellow scientist Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) puts it, "You've killed God, sir!" On a more personal level, it distresses Darwin's deeply religious wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and their relationship has been deteriorating in an atmosphere of unspoken guilt since Annie's death.

Darwin ignores Emma and his other children as he attempts to write his stalled book, spurred on by Huxley and Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch), as well as by the ghost of Annie (Martha West). A precocious little girl, she shared her father's inquisitive personality and passion for nature. She was collecting starfish in her bloomers on a rugged English beach when she caught the chill that may have precipitated her mysterious fatal illness. Now, as an insistent little spectre, she haunts his study, urging him to buck up and put pen to paper.

British director Amiel – best known for such 1990s films as Entrapment and The Man Who Knew Too Little – shifts artfully back and forth between the writing of Origin and the years of Annie's short life. In scenes of the latter, we see Darwin as a playful, loving and devoted father, taking his children on nature hikes and teaching them about geology and entomology, when he isn't regaling them with tales of his South American explorations on HMS Beagle. These lead to further flashbacks, touching briefly on the observations Darwin made during that legendary voyage, which would form the basis for his theory of natural selection.

Annie's favourite story, however, is one about her father's studies with Jenny, a bright female orangutan at the London Zoo. The Jenny episodes, as it happens, are among the most effective in the film, making us wonder again how, pre-Darwin, people could be so willfully blind to the blatant link between animal and human life.

Less successful are Amiel's efforts to illustrate Darwin's musings on nature's cruelty using antic time-lapse sequences. Darwin's nightmares, meanwhile, come with effects more suited to a low-budget horror movie. Ironically enough, however, the picture's biggest weakness is the absence of chemistry between Bettany and Connelly, who are married in real life. It's partly because Connelly, expressive eyes aside, is such a dry, pent-up actress and partly on account of the film's failure to make Emma anything more than a religious stick-in-the-mud. She seems to be forever banging away on the parlour piano like some symbol of Victorian repression. When Emma defends the way the local vicar (Jeremy Northam) chastises Annie for questioning religious dogma – using a cruel form of punishment that rightly enrages the tender-hearted Darwin – you wonder how a couple with such divergent attitudes ever got together in the first place.

Annie Darwin (Martha West, left) shows her mother, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), a new discovery in Creation. (Recorded Picture Company/D Films) Bettany has a greater rapport with West's saucy little Annie. Heck, he even has more rapport with Jenny the orangutan. The actor, sporting the burning eye and broad brow of genius, wholly succeeds in giving us a sympathetic portrait of Darwin – whether it's the eager young father imparting his infectious love of the natural world to his offspring or the palsied, hollow-eyed man grieving for his dead little girl.

I appreciate the decision of Amiel and screenwriter John Collee (Master and Commander) to narrow their focus to Darwin's domestic life. For their purposes, it makes for a more concise film. However, you can't help thinking that, in concentrating mainly on Darwin's secluded latter years at Down House in Kent, they've missed exploiting the most cinematic aspect of his life – his youthful discoveries on the Beagle.

They've also placed perhaps too much emphasis on personal demons as the reason it took Darwin two decades to create his masterpiece. In fact, his scrupulousness as a scientific researcher had just as much to do with the delay – knowing how incendiary his ideas were, he wanted to make sure he had incontrovertible evidence to back them up.

In other respects, though, the movie is historically illuminating. The illnesses of Annie and Darwin are a reminder of where science stood at the time, at least in respect to medicine. Darwin takes his dying daughter to Malvern in Worcestershire for a drenching dose of Dr. James Gully's experimental hydrotherapy – then later has recourse to it himself. At one point, Gully (a delightfully bluff Bill Paterson) suggests that the mind can bring on physical ailments, but a disbelieving Darwin shrugs off the idea of psychosomatic illness, the way his own detractors rejected evolution.

With a title that seems intended to bait the anti-evolutionists, Creation isn't likely to win over any believers in "intelligent design." The rest of us, meanwhile, might have wished for something with more intellectual vigour and less schmaltz.

Creation opens across Canada on Jan. 22.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.