Movie: Ammonite

 Ammonite.  

Sigh.

Very good performances - both leads were superb - with wonderfully bleak direction/ cinematography and a compelling sense of time and place.

I didn't mind they built it around an invented love affair that didn't happen. It's certainly not the first time romances, central or peripheral, have been used in a "history-inspired" movie (there's even a flirtation in the 1960 war film Sink the Bismarck, which is about battleships. No, not the movie Battleship. That iceberg wreck of a film never existed).

Anyway, we get a great sense of Mary's bare-bones life and the harsh coast she lives on. The fossils are a way to make a living: she doesn't express any special liking for what she does. It doesn;t help that the only person who talks to her much, naturalist/fossil buyer Roderick Murchinson, is a jerk who dismisses his wife as suffering "melancholia." Any cheating that goes on, he deserves. As for Mary, it's only when she has a chance for a very different life that we see she is where she really belongs.

Writer/Director Frances Lee has made an involving movie about relationships, and ok, it's her movie. As a history/paleontology lover, what I minded here is that the affair crowded out everything else: except for having credit stolen for the Icthyosaur, and two lines of dialogue about identifying fossils, the viewer learns nothing whatever about why she was so important to science, not even why the icthyosaur was important, and what her discoveries led to. (See a very good article on that here.) They could have added ten minutes to show her scientific legacy and how much her work on those windswept rocks really mattered.