The fossil-hunting is more interesting than the sex: Ammonite reviewed

Ammonite is writer-director Francis Lee’s second film after God’s Own Country, one of the best films of 2017, and possibly the best film about a closeted gay Yorkshire sheep farmer falling for a migrant worker ever. This is another unlikely romance, but set in the 19th century between the real-life palaeontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and real-life Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), whose wealthy husband had an interest in geology. Mary and Charlotte were friends yet there is no historical evidence they had an affair. This is all poetic licence but told so poetically you will substantially buy it, albeit with a few reservations. Plus it’s Winslet and Ronan and while I’m not usually a sucker for BOGOF offers, you’d surely be crazy to turn this one down.

It all takes place in Lyme Regis. Mary is poor and collects the fossils — clawing out rocks with bare hands, smashing them open with a hammer — that she sells as ‘tourist tut’ from the begrimed shop where she lives with her ailing mother (a very touching Gemma Jones). This is not the prettified Lyme Regis of, say, Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Life is harsh, the landscape is harsh, the weather is harsh, the work is harsh. Mary is taciturn, solitary, withdrawn. She has dirt under her fingernails and red-raw hands. She doesn’t wear a bonnet once, even though it might have cheered her up, I thought in my shallow way.

She hasn’t made a good discovery in years. She had excavated a complete Ichthyosaurus skull, which went to the British Museum, when she was just 11 years old, but men have always stolen the credit for her finds. (The patriarchy. It gets everywhere.) Her character, interestingly, asks for no sympathy but the metaphor is not lost on us.