longwhitecoats

This evening we watched Ammonite, an historical film about the paleontologist Mary Anning. The movie focuses on her relationship with a younger woman, and it was primarily marketed as a queer love story. I have complicated feelings about it; I don't think the movie is really about queerness so much as it is about women, and grief, and women's grief.

My thoughts are under the cut, beginning with content warnings I think may be relevant. This post spoils the entire film.

Content warnings for the film and this post: Grief over the death of a baby (multiple characters); grief over the death of a parent (one character's father before the film, mother during the film).

Mild spoilers for Portrait of a Lady on Fire and God's Own Country.

At the beginning of the film, the young Charlotte, played by Saoirse Ronan, is grieving the death of her baby, and her scientifically-minded, callous husband pays the paleontologist he has come to visit (and exploit) to be Charlotte's carer while he gallavants around on a tour for six weeks. The paleontologist, Mary Anning, is played by Kate Winslet with an extreme economy of words, no makeup, and a lot of aggressively physical acting. They are left in isolation together with Mary's mother, Molly, who obsessively polishes eight porcelain animals every evening.

The story leans heavily on both filmic tropes and what I can only describe as fannish tropes: Mary speaks very little, but there are significant Glances; the cultured Charlotte learns how to wear boots and dig in the dirt; when Charlotte falls very ill, Mary nurses her back to health; There Is Only One Bed and yes, they share it. These parts of the film seem kin to Portrait of a Lady on Fire (although in my opinion, with less originality), as they take advantage of a women-only environment to show the blossoming of queer love.

But unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in which the women care for each other irrespective of their class or status in the household, Ammonite shows Charlotte throwing candlesticks at her maid when irate, and Mary mistakenly being told to use the tradesman's entrance to Charlotte's posh London townhouse when she arrives for a visit (presumably because her clothes and skin are so rough-looking).

And the film's ending was for me a very nasty twist: it turns out that Mary has not been invited for a visit, but instead to move in with Charlotte and her husband, whom Charlotte insists will be gone all the time. Mary panics and gets angry, declaring that Charlotte just wants to keep her like a specimen before flouncing out to go to the British Museum to see the icthyosaurus she discovered when she was a girl. Charlotte follows her there, and the last shot of the movie is the two of them staring at each other through the glass case covering the icthyosaur.

And honestly? It just feels like a tired, homophobic trope rather than a real attempt to grapple with Charlotte and Mary's class differences, which appear and disappear throughout the movie seemingly only when the director remembers that they might be relevant. It's as if The Glass that separates them was inevitable all along because of their queerness. I did not like it at all.

The theme of grief is similarly raised and then dropped over and over again like a stage prop. Charlotte's grief over her child mysteriously vanishes halfway through the film after she cries it out, and it is never mentioned again. We find out that the eight porcelain figures that Mary's mother Molly polishes every night, and insists Mary polish with her to her satisfaction, represent eight babies of Molly's who passed away -- Mary's siblings. It's a gruesome reveal, and Molly passes away not long thereafter.

It's clear that the film wants us to associate Molly's obsessive polishing of her figurines with Mary's polishing of her paleontological finds, as if both of them are too wrapped up in death to engage with the real world. I found it unsatisfying, even a bit ableist. It suggests that Mary's desire to have a self-determined life and boundaries are somehow unnatural, and that Charlotte's desire to bring Mary to London where she can do her "important scientific work" is good and maybe even Feminist, regardless of how much it tramples upon Mary's wishes. It muddles the message about class and entirely ignores the ways in which the British Museum and the British scientific world is founded on colonialism.

The one part of the film that I unreservedly loved was Fiona Shaw, beatifically filmed as Mary's ex-girlfriend. Her storyline uses some heavy-handed visual symbolism that I'm a sucker for. The first part of the movie is extremely cold, filmed only in blue, brown, and grey. When Mary reluctantly visits her ex to buy a pot of salve for Charlotte, she pushes open a gate to reveal a sea of vivid flowers in a lush green garden. The distinction is so sharp it reminded me of The Wizard of Oz. The ex-girlfriend is unremittingly kind; she speaks gently to her, and she tries to give Mary the salve for free, but accepts payment when Mary wordlessly insists, not wanting to feel indebted.

After Mary uses the salve to heal Charlotte, their romance literally blossoms: colors begin to return to their clothing and the frame of the film. Flower prints appear on their dresses and actual flowers or green vegetables are piled in baskets and vases. Life returns.

It's a trope that I think God's Own Country, a similarly laconic queer movie, did better: the queerness at the heart of the film gradually spreads and heals everyone in it. In Ammonite, as I mentioned above, the healing has limits, and the film does not end happily. But I liked that Fiona Shaw's character is never demonized or problematized. Her queerness is only ever good and healing, and she does her best for Mary.

I'm not sure whether I'd recommend this film or not. I think it's interesting, but it tells a story I've heard before, and not one that I need. In some ways, it's more like The Imitation Game than a real love story, inasmuch as it paints a queer historical figure as a Lone Cold Genius Who Couldn't Love. Alan Turing wasn't like that, and now I want to read a biography of Mary Anning, because I'd bet my hat she wasn't like that either.