Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan's great performances can't lift up Ammonite's muted tone
Millennia from now, when some unfathomable entities go sifting through the fossils of our lives, the new film, the film has many trappings of contemporary indie moviemaking: it’s grim, spare, and so carefully sapped of vim it can barely breathe.
It’s what a lot of Serious Cinema aims to be these days, opaque and withholding in a chilly gesture toward all the passion supposedly roiling beneath the surface., which is a perfectly fine movie. It’s just a bit tiring to see yet another muted period piece that imagines life in the olden days as such a pallid slog. I don’t doubt that there were binding social strictures in the past; there’s plenty of documentation of that fact. But there must also have beencontains precious little of any of that, choosing instead to capture an imagined affair between renowned paleontologists Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison as a dreary still life., was also aloof at times, colored in a similar gray palette and guarded with its emotions. But there were true, glorious blooms of sentiment in that movie too, brilliantly offsetting—and complementing—the brittle, wintry stuff. Those big moments arrive inas well, but they’re too little too late, serving only as a glum reminder of what the entirety of the film could have been—and what its two terrific lead actors could have done—had Lee not turned the flame all the way down.’s supposition about her sexuality has drawn some ire ahead of the film’s release. I don’t really understand that line of thinking; straight relationships are imagined for historical figures all the time, even the kind of ’shipping that this movie does. That the film has been dogged by the faintest bit of controversy belies what a staid and small movie it is.is a glacial mood piece, set on the blustery coast of Dorset, where Anning spent her days digging rocks out of the sand to find the hidden imprints of long dead things buried within. There’s a gentle metaphor there, I suspect, Lee examining a woman so obsessed with life as it was without attending much to her life as it is. It’s a sad irony, one that Lee doesn’t lean too heavily on, but still could have teased out amore. It’s a frustration with a movie like this, that I started to want some big, cheesy monologue about why this woman loves fossils so much., who doesn’t need a ton of lines to communicate a depth of feeling. Her version of Anning is pinched but clearly pained, a lonely woman living with her stern, ailing mother, the both of them laden with a weary grief. Winslet does masterful things with just a slight shift in her gaze, or a tensed reaction to a person’s intrusion into her stony little sphere; she’s quite good in the film, but I yearned for her to have more moments of release and clarity. Lee goes past casting Anning as a taciturn, repressed woman and instead nearly makes her a statue., who plays Murchison as a fragile young woman wracked by the loss of her child, there’s not much energy to grab onto. Ronan matches Winslet well in their project of quiet acting, but neither character has become truly knowable by the end of the film. They don’t lack chemistry, but Lee kind of forces them together, dolls in a frigid drama rather than naturally attracted vessels of palpable desire.brings some pep to her handful of scenes, playing a woman from Anning’s past in a delicate nod to the longer narrative of Anning’s romantic woes., charms briefly as a French doctor who’s maybe sweet on Anning before he floats off. But this is mostly Winslet’s and Ronan’s show, and they do as much as they can to fight the airlessness of Lee’s design. I’m not going to go into any panting particulars about the film’s already touted sex scene, except to say that Lee remains admirably committed to bringing the visceral realities of queer sex to the screen, without leering or other prurience. The sex in bothconvincingly functions as intimate dialogue for laconic people. These characters are so hemmed in by their environments that the only way they can make the fullness of their beings known is in physical expression. In, though, the sex scene is so singularly passionate—in a film otherwise devoid of that ardent need—that it stands out too glaringly. It is, in some sense, the only time we really feel Anning and Murchison connect. Until the film’s final scenes, anyway, which Lee stages with a lovely, bitter ache. These last moments with Anning and Murchison are haunting—they linger after the movie has ended, and they hover over the memory of the rest of the film. Couldn’t there have been such artful illustration of likely doomed longing elsewhere in? Must everything else have been so rigid and exactingly stark? Whatever the truth of Anning and Murchison’s time in Dorset together was,could have done whatever it wanted. It chooses instead to do close to nothing, and leaves us, quite like its central pair, helplessly grasping for more.
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