When Ammonite was first announced, it sounded like an Oscar party waiting to happen. Academy Award-winner Kate Winslet and four-time nominee Saoirse Ronan play 19th-century archaeologist lovers! They might as well hand over the gongs right now, you thought, but things haven’t turned out that way. Snubbed by the Globes and Academy Awards, Ammonite has been largely ignored even by the reliably partisan BAFTAs. Why?
Ammonite is a little slow, perhaps, and is certainly grimmer than your usual British costume drama. But it’s a fine film in its way, and the acting should certainly have been recognised, particularly Kate Winslet’s earthy and anguished central performance.
Francis Lee directs and writes, and his screenplay takes an imaginative leap, assuming that its doughty protagonist, an amateur Dorset palaeontologist called Mary Anning, had a passionate affair with her friend and collaborator, Charlotte Murchison. There seems no actual evidence for this physical relationship, but it’s a highly attractive period plot device, and on it Ammonite resolutely hangs its hat.
Anning (Winslet) is known far and wide around 1830s Lyme Regis as a bit of an oddball. Her curt manners win her few friends and she spends most of her time on the beach, head bent as she combs the stones for fossils. When she was just a girl, she and her father discovered the giant fossil of a sea-going dinosaur, Ichthyosaurus.
Mary’s skill at finding and reading the significance of fossils brought her fame in academic circles, but all her discoveries were quickly appropriated by male scientists. Now she ekes a living running a gift shop in Lyme Regis, and is not best pleased when an unctuous London scientist comes to see her.
Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) is an admirer of Mary’s work, and asks to accompany her on her trips to the beach. Reluctantly, she agrees — for a fee. Inspired by her example, Murchison heads off on a geological trip across Europe, leaving behind his young and sickly wife Charlotte (Ronan), whom he asks Mary to watch out for. Bad idea, mate.
Director Francis Lee took an imaginative leap with the love story
The two women don’t hit it off at first, but everything changes when Charlotte, while visiting Mary’s shop, faints and falls into a dangerous fever. Though she already looks after her frail and aged mother (Gemma Jones), Mary is obliged to nurse Charlotte through her illness, and as she does, relations improve. So much so in fact, that they end up sharing a bed together, and shatter their mutual loneliness in a passionate affair.
Various liberties have been taken with the facts here. The real Charlotte Murchison was actually 11 years older than Mary Anning, and would not have been the fey and blushing bride we’re presented with in Ammonite. There is also the issue of their affair.
Is it moral to bestow sexual orientations and activities on the defenceless dead? It doesn’t bother me in the least, but the actual Mary Anning may have had something to say about it.
Francis Lee has said: “After seeing queer history routinely ‘straightened’ throughout culture, and given a historical figure where there is no evidence whatsoever of a heterosexual relationship, is it not permissible to view that person within another context?”.
I’m not sure I follow the logic of that assertion, but the Anning-Murchison romance is very nicely rendered by Mr Lee and his actors. Mary’s hands are rough and calloused, but Charlotte’s are milky white, unblemished by work. When first those hands caress, that contrast makes the moment more moving. And when the couple eventually conjoin, the hooks and stays of their voluminous Victorian clothes present an almost insuperable obstacle to passion.
It must be great fun to play a rude person, and Kate Winslet is excellent as Mary, whose bluntness is a defence mechanism shielding deep and violent passions. “All boys together,” she mutters when Roderick Murchison mentions the Royal Geographical Society: Mary’s bitter about having been so comprehensively sidelined because of her sex, bitter too that her sexual inclination has no respectable outlet.
As Charlotte, Saoirse Ronan is touching, doll-like, but is not given enough to play with, and Ammonite starts very well before meandering to a standstill near the end. But it’s strangely absorbing, bolstered by strong performances. And whether or not Charlotte and Mary’s romance actually happened, Ammonite almost convinces you it did.
Banksy: Most Wanted
(ifi@home, 82mins) ***
How talented is Banksy? His sense of humour, and supreme promotional gifts are certainly not in doubt. Seamus Haley’s documentary opens in October, 2018 at Sotheby’s, where Banksy’s paintingBalloon Girl had just been sold for £1m when an alarm sounded inside the frame, which begins to shred the painting. Brilliant, the talking heads in this documentary gush, a perfect critique of the art world’s vulgar capitalisation. But Banksy’s many works change hands for high prices, and someone is making money.
Banksy’s career might not have been possible outside the digital era. His work has always had political undercurrents, pithily observed if rather obvious in its targets. “He is, in the Kardashian age,” says one observer, “probably the only person who doesn’t want to be famous.” An absurd statement, and of course he is famous, we just don’t know who he is. In Banksy: Most Wanted, a number of suspects are mooted, most compellingly Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja. Whoever he is, Banksy’s successful maintenance of his secret identity seems an achievement in itself, and he’s the artist this age deserves.
Operation Varsity Blues
(Netflix, 99mins) ****
In the spring of 2019, the world was shocked (though not that shocked) when the high-profile arrests of actress Felicity Huffman and others revealed a far-reaching college admissions scandal. Its Svengali was one Rick Singer, an independent college counsellor who between 2011 and 2018 was paid more than £25m by wealthy parents to bribe officials at elite colleges and fraudulently inflate entrance exam results. This torturous tale of corruption and entitlement is compellingly told in Chris Smith’s excellent documentary, which mixes interviews with dramatised sequences in which Matthew Modine plays an oily and plausible Singer.
Matthew Modine as William 'Rick' Singer in Operation Varsity Blues. Photo: Netflix
There were, he tells his wealthy clients, three ways of getting into America’s Ivy League colleges: through the front door (ie, by actual merit), through the back door (by making multi-million dollar donations to institutions), or via what Singer called the ‘side door’ — paying him to bribe officials, inflate bad marks, even invent sporting proficiency. A dirty game but part of a larger, endemic corruption of US third-level education by a super-wealthy elite.
