Butler's Cinema Scene

Kate Winslet,Saorise Ronan

“AMMONITE” My rating: C+

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Kate Winslet is a great actress. No argument.

And I would happily sit in awe as Saorise Ronan read translated-from-the-Korean assembly instructions.

But despite the presences of these two acting giants, “Ammonite” is a bore. Albeit a bore punctuated with a heavy-breathing woman-on-woman sex scene .

Francis Lee’s film is inspired by historic fact.

Paleontology, the study of the fossil record, was all the rage In the early Victorian era.  The science itself was still in an embryonic stage, but the dream of uncovering the remains of some prehistoric marvel motivated many a wealthy gentleman (the sort of chaps who had way too much money and time on their hands) to become amateur diggers.

Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) may be the best of them, a self-taught fossil sleuth who studies the eroded cliffs along the Lime coast where she lives and has a knack for big discoveries.

Not that she gets any credit for her genius.  A single woman who is the sole support of her elderly mother (Gemma Jones), Mary sells her finds to well-heeled men who then submit them — under their names, not Mary’s — to museums and scientific organizations.

So, yeah, Mary has a chip on her shoulder.

Enter Charlotte Murchison (Ronan), whose callow hubby (James McArdle) is one of those gentlemen scholars.  He proposes dropping off the Missus to spend a few weeks living in the Anning household while he goes digging. He will, of course, pay for her room and board.

Charlotte is a timorous young thing. Apparently she’s endured a disastrous pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth; now her hubby wants nothing to do with her physically.

Not that Mary is much more simpatico, being a grumpy misanthrope who wants only to be left alone with her rocks.

Both Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison actually existed.  Lee’s screenplay imagines a torrid affair between the two women.

And that’s pretty much it.

“Ammonite” (the title refers to the shelled sea creatures whose fossils are common in Britain) certainly has the right feminist bona fides.  It’s about a woman denied the recognition she deserved because of her sex and station. It’s a lesbian love story in which the two actresses, working with their gay male director and an all-woman crew, staged the shockingly in-your-face bedroom scenes while avoiding the usual male-gaze issues.

But for all that if feels weirdly by-the-numbers, like 2nd-rate Masterpiece Theatre with nudity.

| Robert W. Butler