It’s hot love in a cold climate, along the Jurassic coast of Lyme, West Dorset sea, where Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) collects fossils and then, literally, a lover.
Charlotte Murchison (Saorise Ronan) is the wife of Roderick Murchinson (James McArdle) a scientist — “A man of the new world.” But Charlotte is high society, high-heeled and high on ideas when she finds herself in Mary Anning’s graces (after her husband leaves Charlotte there in Mary’s care.) Sad wide-eyed and pale, Charlotte has lost an infant child. She’s convalescing…or in our modern terms, suffering post-partum depression. (Quite honestly the role screamed for doe-eyed Kyra Knightley.)
The film ‘Ammonite’ gets its name from extinct forms related to the pearly nautilus that are frequently found as fossils in marine rocks dating from the Devonian Period. There’s irony in the fossils since real-life paleontologist, Mary Anning, is cold, frigid, and hard to unveil and unearth…that is until she meets Charlotte.
Kate Winslet delivers a sexually fearless performance of a lifetime…one of a lonely brittle spinster who burns with desire. Not much is said. Emotion outweighing dialog. She tugs at her skirt, hiking it up to dig for treasures and the cracked spiral of an ammonite. Living with her mother (Gemma Jones) in a home covered in sea salt, one where Mary is almost as extinct as her findings that must be cleaned and labored over. Then once that happens – like a romance – she shines!
The forbidden love unfolds in a rocky time against an even rockier coastline. Yet, there is no room for melodrama here, only the drama that beats at the hearts of these misfit women as twin flame soulmates… destined for disaster in a male centric world.
Director Francis Lee should be applauded for again delivering into a film that addresses the challenges of homosexual relationships. He first burst onto the scene three years ago with God’s Own Country, a story set in Yorkshire, England about a young farmer who numbs his frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until a migrant worker rocks his world.
But Ammonite is a film not about the discovery. It’s about the challenges of love, albeit impossible to start with, since women of that era were not allowed to, well, love.
A sad movie in the end… reminiscent of The Light Between Oceans when a lighthouse keeper and his wife, living off the coast of Australia, raise a baby they rescue from a drifting boat. Nevertheless, Winslet and Ronan will be headed to an Oscar nomination.