JURASSIC MUD GARDEN REVEALED

WINSLET CHARACTER OVERCOME BY OCEAN WAVES AND MUD

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Mary Anning dug about the mud and rocks and ocean waves of the Jurassic marine fossil beds as a young child with her father and brother.

Director Francis Lee dramatizes a short episode in Anning’s life, still mucking about and discovering various skeletons as an adult woman in Old England, but also a time for her when her inner life was much more complicated.

Kate Winslet plays Anning as an introverted scientist lacking a touch in social skills because she has spent too much time with books, drawings and fossils.

Anning also seems scarred by the back story of her difficult life growing up on the coast at Dorset in the 18^th Century.

Lee keeps the narrative within a respectful timeframe without resorting to flashbacks or redirects into secondary narratives.

The fossil gardens are used as a narrative device with a slow moving script limited mainly to locations on the seaside and within Anning’s seaside residence.

Lee could have spent more time elsewhere with his camera, but he seems to have stayed in the fossil gardens with the fossils for a reason.

One of the first scenes is of Anning and her mother, Molly, played by Gemma Jones, sitting down for brunch after Mary returns from the beach mud with a fossil.

Molly cracks open a chicken egg with a partially developed chick embryo inside, and then throws it into the wood stove for incineration purposes.

Lee uses a score only sparingly, keeping instead the individual scene dramatizations simple like the simple life along the Atlantic Ocean. The sounds of the cold ocean wind, waves, and rain, contrasted with the crackling burning wood of a fireplace warming the inside of the seaside home, are used instead to fill in the scenes and compel the narrative forward.

Saoirse Ronan joins the cast as Charlotte Murchison. Murchison’s back story is provided as an example of relationships and marriage at a time when life was much more challenging, unequal and often unfair to women.

Ronan performs seaside melancholia. Ronan has been nominated for Oscars four times for performances in Little Women (2019), Lady Bird (2017), Brooklyn (2015) and Atonement (2007). Lee makes one intertextual reference to Lady Bird.

Winslet has seven nominations, including one win for her performance in The Reader (2009). Winslet of course shot to super stardom in the James Cameron blockbuster, Titanic (1997), co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kathy Bates.

The acting fits well with the script, while Winslet and Ronan are cast well together.

Lee moves the film as if himself combing the sand, moving slow with intermittent expressions of solitude, such as close ups on seaside creatures, a bird, a crab and a beetle.

The genre is more of a period piece than a costume genre, although Lee shows how women were typecast by their clothes, with the daily dresses not suitable for mucking about digging for fossils. Even Anning, who seems to work full time in the marine fossil beds, does not dare to dawn trousers, etc.

Winslet and Ronan also explore the meaning of relationships, with marriage seeming a bit too constraining, and friendships between women still too formal.

Anning is portrayed as disassociated from the community and her neighbours, but the reason for that unfriendliness is not revealed to the audience.

Murchison’s daily presence with Anning begins to light up her inner soul, with flickers of emotions showing in her eyes beginning with the moment of their first sight of each other in Anning’s tourist shop. As Anning would say in another context, ‘there might be something there or there might be nothing there.

Murchison needs a doctor after developing a fever form an impromptu swim in the frigid waters off the Atlantic. Dr. Lieberson, played by Alec Secareanu, recommends bed rest. And the good doctor persuades Anning to provide Murchison with daily care.

As a result, Anning and Murchison gradually form a bond that leads to a sexual relationship. Lee has been criticized for over dramatizing the script as the historical record does not indicate that Anning was a lesbian. Lee has manipulated Anning’s life story for the purpose of commercialization in theatres and streaming.

Lee has missed an opportunity here, and he instead seems to have dialed everything down a bit too much to suit his fossilized narrative device.

Ammonite is streaming for the first time in Canada on Amazon Prime.