Ammonite

Ammonite

On a cloudy day, a lady walks across the stony ground. The mud and the raging waves indicate that this film is deeply sensuous and often unvarying in its portrayal of mundane activities. However, she trips as she scans through different rocks on the beach it’s Mary Anning (Kate Winslet), a renowned fossil collector who scours the shore for signs of prehistoric life while living with her taciturn mother Molly (Gemma Jones).

But what may appear monotonous to some people picking up stones to polish them in search for fossils, hardly speaking seems like routine existence for her. She has very little dialogue at any point in “Ammonite,” trusting that lead performer Kate Winslet can communicate volumes without words from early on. That trust is rewarded with one of Winslet’s finest performances ever.

Mary’s world changes when a man named Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) comes into her shop; he’s another paleontologist who appears to genuinely value what she does, though he barely notices her irritation at how being a woman has ensured that nobody recognizes those achievements more widely.

Roderick is married to Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), whom he treats more harshly than Mary does her fossils Lee only visually compares them directly once, with a shot of a bug trapped in a jar, but it fits: Charlotte is a woman who is told when and what to do by a husband who tells people she has “melancholia.” Their dynamic is set early in an ordering scene: Roderick gets an elaborate meal for himself before telling the waiter to bring his wife “plain whitefish, baked, no sauce.”

While Roderick tries to pick up some tips from Mary, his wife falls ill and he decides that some sea air might do Charlotte good. He leaves her behind in this small coastal town in hopes of helping her rest, asking Mary if maybe she’d like to go on some fossil-hunting expeditions. But thankfully Lee doesn’t lean too hard into the city/country dynamic once they get out on the water the next day. Charlotte adapts to life with Mary, even helping her with her work. There’s a scene in which Charlotte assists in carrying a large rock that Mary couldn’t have moved by herself, and this is significant because it’s a movie about connection and how sometimes things require four hands instead of two.

Mary and Charlotte become closer and closer until they have a physical relationship. But it turns out that, despite their different backgrounds and interests, they are really good for each other. They are wonderful partners who show us things about ourselves that we didn’t know before; “Ammonite” gets at that without overstating it.

Lee is tactile without being exploitative or manipulative. Actually parts of “Ammonite” could be argued to be too low-register, but in a way that reflects its protagonist’s personality and keeps this love story from becoming melodramatic when it very easily could. Then the film bursts into passionate love-making scenes that contrast with everything else in the movie which is so drudgy. It’s like watching drowning people gasp for air or people in darkness seeing blinding light for the first time. And this makes Mary and Charlotte’s passion burn brighter.

All of this falls apart completely without two high caliber performers to pull it off. Ronan does very good work here she quite literally always does ‘very good’ work but the movie really belongs to Winslet, who shows us all over again how amazing she can be given the right material. She avoids every single trap there was to fall into with this character, refusing to do anything big or reclusive early on in the film and finding so much to say through body language instead of dialogue throughout.

The way her body responds when Charlotte touches her for the first time, then as their relationship becomes more physical feels like something breaks open inside her. There’s so much grace and nuance in this performance you could study it just to think through all of the smart decisions Winslet makes scene by scene which are many. She has an incredibly small amount of dialogue, no narration even, yet conveys an overwhelming amount of inner conflict; never once does any of it feel forced or manufactured.

And Ronan matches her beat for beat with Winslet in the second half of the movie especially. She has also been changed by this but responds differently to that change. Some people will be frustrated with the final scene, but it will also lead to some really interesting writing about where these characters went from here.

Mary Anning was a real fossil hunter who made very important discoveries, but there’s no evidence that she had a relationship with someone like Charlotte. Anning’s descendants have objected to the use of a real person for a story such as this, however I stop caring about that when we ask ourselves if people would object to a straight romance being fictitiously placed on Anning (only the most puritanical historians would).

With “Ammonite,” Francis Lee is reaching for something deeper than making another biopic or teaching us another page of history. This is a story about connection, which all of us try for even after our lives seem to have made it impossible; and even people as removed from society as Anning can suddenly find themselves thrust into life-changing relationships and we can all meet somebody who changes our lives forever like an unexpected fossil find, digging through the rocks on the shore and seeing something you’ve never seen before.

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