76 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
THE CURRENTCINEMA
DIGGING DEEP
“Ammonite” and “The Nest.”BY ANTHONYLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY MASHA KRASNOVA-SHABAEVA
T
here are certain fields of human
activity to which the keen amateur
can make a notable contribution. These
fields include archeology, astronomy,
and, to a laughable extent, politics. One
influential example is that of Mary An-
ning (1799-1847), an Englishwoman
who lived in Lyme Regis, on the Dor-
set coast—or, as it is occasionally and
inadequately known, the Jurassic Coast.
The crumbling cliffs along it, dating
from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Creta-
ceous periods, are a happy hunting
ground for anyone seeking the fossil-
ized remains of ancient creatures. The
nearest American equivalent would be
the Academy Awards.
Mary, the daughter of a cabinetmaker,
was one of ten children, and a fossil-
finder extraordinaire, who excavated the
skeleton of an ichthyosaur before she
reached her teens. According to an ar-
ticle in All the Year Round, a journal ed-
ited by Charles Dickens, she became
“lively and intelligent” after surviving a
lightning strike in infancy. The article
commends her “to those who like to
study character, and are fond of seeing
good stubborn English perseverance
make way even where there is nothing
in its favour.” No surprise, therefore, that
the role of Mary, in “Ammonite,” a new
movie written and directed by Francis
Lee, should go to Kate Winslet. In any
survey of her films, it’s hard to find an
instance in which she has not given stub-
bornness a good name. The set of herjaw and the blaze of her glance suggest
a self-freeing spirit who knows the path
ahead and is determined to take it. With
a shyer or more rarefied actress on deck,
“Titanic” (1997) might have sunk.
Here she is, then, as the adult Mary,
stomping along the beach outside Lyme.
It’s shingle all the way; none of that
balmy nonsense about golden sands.
Gazing cliffward, and spying something
of interest, she hikes up her skirts, clam-
bers, tugs at a rock, then loses her foot-
ing and slithers down. She is unbroken,
but the rock, falling past her, is split in
two, revealing the cracked spiral of an
ammonite. What matters here is the
physicality—how close we are to Mary
as she labors, tumbles, and gasps for
breath. Later, back at the small housethat she shares with her mother, Molly
(Gemma Jones), Mary’s hands, even
after she’s washed them, look red and
raw, with dirt under the nails. The house
confronts the sea, and the windows are
speckled with grime and salt. Nothing
in this film seems easy; living humans,
no less than extinct species, get embed-
ded and stuck, and need to be prized
out with care.
The prizing takes different forms.
Mary attracts the attention of a Dr. Lie-
berson (Alec Secareanu)—“Foreign?”
Molly asks, as if the word were a curse.
Suaver by far is a gentleman named
Roderick Murchison ( James McArdle),
who has an interest in fossils, and has
come to pay homage to “the presiding
deity of Lyme,” as he calls Mary. (It’s
true; her expertise, accrued through years
of patient observation, was well known
to her fellow-paleontologists.) If she
will conduct him along the shore, and
school him in her wisdom, he will re-
ward her. They agree to a deal, and shake
on it, though she can’t bring herself to
look at him as they touch; it’s as if her
very nature, acclimatized to being alone,
recoils at any pact of understanding. Oh,
and Murchison has one other request:
he has brought his youthful wife, Char-
lotte (Saoirse Ronan), who is spectre-
pale. Her health is impaired, and we
gather that she has recently lost a child.
While he travels for a month or so, could
she not stay on in Lyme, “walk out” with
Mary, and take the revivifying air?
You can tell what’s coming. Two un-
happy souls, having had the misfortune
to be born in an unenlightened age,
will take comfort in each other’s arms,
in a rousing rebuke to the social code
of their times. That’s what happened
in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019),
and it happens here, too, though it’s
surely a sign of our times that we can
conceive of such protest only in sexual
terms. To Mary’s contemporaries, what
would have set her apart, and barred
her from the institutions of learning
and research where she doubtless be-
longed, was not just her gender, and
her lowly class, but the fact that she
was a Dissenter—that is, she was raised
in a strain of Protestantism outside the
Church of England. As you’d expect,
faith goes unremarked in “Ammonite,”
which prefers to show Murchison roll-
ing away from his wife, in bed, and say-Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet star in Francis Lee’s film.