AMMONITE | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Francis Lee (15, 120 mins)
Following the success of gritty love story God’s Own Country, its immersive director focuses on another passionate yarn, this time based on a true story. A restrained, tough Kate Winslet plays fossil hunter Mary Anning, scouring her West Dorset seaside home in the 1840s for fossils and dinosaur bones to sell in a trinket shop and occasionally making amazing finds that end up in the British Museum. Her crowning achievements long past, she struggles to make a living to care for herself and her brittle, caustic mother – played by Gemma Jones and obsessed with china dogs, each representing a lost child that Mary and her mother meticulously clean.
When Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte Murchison, trapped in a loveless marriage with her fossil geek husband (James McArdle), is left in her care after she falls ill, a gradual bond develops between them. Ronan is wealthy and entitled, Winslet a relentless lower-class grafter, but an unlikely and eventually passionate relationship slowly builds between them, each giving the other an outlet from their fairly miserable lots. Winslet is superb as the no-nonsense Anning, who finds herself strangely caught up in a love for Ronan’s delicate creature. Director Lee immerses us in their daily grind, searching for fossils in a rugged and mostly grey landscape; turbulent weather and freezing seas eventually gives way to some sun and calmer waters as their love blooms. But can their affair ever last?
Anning’s past with local socialite lover Elizabeth Philpot – played with restrained grace by Fiona Shaw – is subtly framed, as is her tacit encouragement of a love affair with Ronan’s married city girl. A melancholy runs throughout, Winslet retaining a mask of repression and duty and a knowledge of her own paleontological abilities. Another gritty, acutely observed romantic drama that you can feel in your bones from director Francis Lee.
Released on Fri 26 Mar
words KEIRON SELF