He’s almost childlike in his enthusiasm, and she’s her usual taciturn self. Roderick Murchison persuades Mary to take him fossil-hunting, and she agrees when he offers to pay. He’s anxious to travel abroad she’s grieving. We learn from subtle clues that Charlotte Murchison has lost a child and her husband is impatient that she’s not recovering as quickly as he thinks she should. Murchison (McArdle and Ronan), a gung-ho wannabe geologist, and his invalid wife who has been prescribed sea air. ![]() She is fearless, outspoken, a woman of few words who has no time for conventional female propriety or manners. She knows the value of her work, even if she is ignored and demeaned by the gentlemen scientists of her time. But she is still writing and researching, regarding herself as a scientist and not a treasure hunter. ![]() She knows she’s denied recognition and status for her scientific work because it’s the territory of educated gentlemen. She’s decided not to search for major, large fossils she’s after trinkets with which to fleece the tourists and sustain a steady income. Mary gets on with things with a surly stoicism, striding off to dig for fossils on the muddy Dorset cliffs in grubby cottagecore gear. Her mother is fragile physically and emotionally. It’s clear that now in 1840 they are struggling the household clues-a badly out-of-tune piano, their pretty lace collars, and caps-indicate that they were once better off. This was the Annings’ business, excavating and selling fossils, and decorating items like mirrors and boxes with shells. The sale of that fossil to the British Museum kept Mary and her widowed mother for a year. The film opens with the sound of rhythmic splashes, not that of the sea, as you’d expect, but of a woman scrubbing a floor-woman’s work, right? And that floor is in a museum, where some men are bringing in a new acquisition for display, a fossil ichthyosaur discovered by an obscure, lower-class eleven-year-old girl in Lyme, Dorset. ![]() A ladybug explores a botanical print we watch Mary (Winslet) and her mother (Jones) perform everyday household tasks and Mary searches, cleans, and prepares fossils for sale, detailed and painstaking skilled work. The cinematography is gorgeous, from the fierce Dorset winds and tides to the interior shots of the Annings’ house, which have the richness and detail of a Dutch 17th-century interior. Instead, it’s a subtle, careful exploration of intimacy, work, and love. Lee does not even try to persuade the viewer that paleontologist Mary Anning (1799–1847) needed a love affair to round out her life (thank goodness). This fertile cross-pollination pays off in the ensemble acting, with brilliant performances by both Winslet and Ronan in the lead roles. James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan ( Little Women) both starred in 2018's Mary Queen of Scots, and McArdle also appeared in recent HBO hit Mare of Easttown with Winslet. It is a film about passion that is for the most part understated, with the eloquent palette and use of natural scenery and weather that characterized Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017). It reunites Gemma Jones and Kate Winslet in their first mother-daughter roles since the Oscar-nominated 1995 film Sense and Sensibility. The 2020 film Ammonite is written and directed by Francis Lee and features a strong ensemble cast who perform the miracle of expressing emotion tempered with restraint, doing a lot with few words.
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