Ammonite
Kate Winslet brings dignity, vulnerability and pain to a searing portrait of a woman ahead
of her time.
On pebble beach: Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet
and Saoirse Ronan are two of the finest actresses of their respective
generations. For them to agree to star in Francis Lee’s sophomore feature is a
testament to his standing as a cinematic force to reckon with. While Ammonite is unlikely to grab a mass
audience by the lapels, it is a fiercely accomplished work that consumes the
viewer through sheer authenticity and power of understatement. To employ an
artistic metaphor, it is perhaps a miniature, or an impressionistic adaptation
of a Vermeer or Hammershøi. Here, every nuance counts, as does every unanswered
question and accidental touch. While vastly different in period and location to
his first film, God’s Own Country
(2017), Ammonite displays many
parallels. Both films see opposites making human contact in stark, hostile
environments and both explore subterranean emotion and even sexuality. And both
showcase the director’s extraordinarily cinematic eye.
An ammonite
is a fossil of an extinct mollusc from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, found in rock
and displaying a frilled spiral form. And, as palaeontologists know only too
well, they take enormous patience and skill to be coaxed out of their hiding
places. Kate Winslet plays the real-life Mary Anning, one such palaeontologist,
who devotes her days to roaming the beaches of Lyme Regis in Dorset in solitary
pursuit of excavating the marvels of the past. She is standoffish, to say the
least, and lives a spartan life with her elderly mother, Molly (Gemma Jones), to
whom she barely speaks. In fact, in the early scenes, one might be forgiven for
thinking that Mary is a mute. Then a gentleman and his wife turn up from London
to pay their respects at Mary’s shop, an establishment that purveys run-of-the-mill
fossils to tourists. He, Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), is hoping for an
insight into Mary’s world, while his wife, Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), who is
suffering from mild melancholia, is encouraged to rest and take the sea air. Unable
to accompany her husband on his work overseas, Charlotte stays behind in Lyme Regis,
when her health takes a turn for the worse. Reluctantly, Mary puts her dislike for
the younger woman to one side in order to help her recuperate…
Saoirse
Ronan is already attracting Oscar buzz for her role as best supporting actress (which,
in the event, would make it her fifth nomination), but it is Kate Winslet who
truly inhabits her character. She is every inch the tough, working spinster,
her distant demeanour concealing layers of historic hurt and disappointment. She
is wedded to her work and has secured a significant niche in her male-dominated
field, prompting one visitor to dub her “the reigning deity of Lyme.” From her
gentle West Country burr to her grubby, hardened hands, Winslet’s Mary is a
genuine product of 1840s’ Dorset. Her heart would seem to be as inflexible as
the ammonite she digs up, so when she does, eventually, offer the shadow of a
smile, it is an emotionally devastating moment.
While the film’s
dramatic passages are more contained than in God’s Own Country – perhaps displaying a more feminine stance – the
connection between Mary and Charlotte makes more sense. It was hard to
comprehend what the Jesus-like Romanian migrant Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu) saw
in the self-serving alcoholic yob Johnny (Josh O’Connor) in Francis Lee’s first
film. Here, we learn that Mary lost eight of her siblings and so she and her
mother embark on a daily, wordless ritual of cleaning eight ornaments that
Molly calls her “babies.” So maybe Charlotte’s vulnerability unlocks a maternal
instinct in Mary’s stony nature, although Charlotte herself is keen to have
children. Eschewing voice-over, exposition or captions, the film respects its
audience’s intelligence by drip-feeding detail in almost subliminal moments,
such as when Charlotte briefly fawns over a baby in the street. And to
reinforce the film’s sense of realism, when Charlotte plays the piano, she does
so less than proficiently. Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann's background
score is virtually non-existent – indeed, it’s not until Mary and Charlotte
are first alone together that a note of music is heard. All of which adds up to an impression
of overarching conviction, from the spare, austere interiors of the Annings’
house to the meticulous Lyme Regis street scenes. An original work of great
sadness and economy, Ammonite rings
with a terrible truth and an indictment of its period.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma
Jones, James McArdle, Alec Secăreanu, Fiona Shaw, Claire Rushbrook, Wendy
Nottingham.
Dir Francis Lee, Pro Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Fodhla Cronin O'Reilly, Screenplay Francis Lee, Ph Stéphane Fontaine, Pro Des Sarah Finlay, Ed Chris Wyatt, Music Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann, Costumes Michael O’Connor, Dialect
coach Laura Hart.
BBC Films/British Film Institute/See-Saw Films-Lionsgate.
117 mins. UK/Australia/USA. 2020. US Rel: 26 March 2021. Cert. 15.