Doing the movie analysis for Ammonite this time. Ammonite (2020) professes to be biographical or based on a true story, but it actually bends the truth to where it would be revisionist to call it anything but fiction. The trouble I have with Ammonite is that it doesn’t celebrate paleontologist Mary Anning’s life and work so much as it uses her story as a vehicle to promote director Franicis Lee’s political viewpoint. Watching this film only roused my skepticism and made me wonder if the life of the unsung paleontologist was being truly represented.
The lack of faithfulness could have been forgiven if the story was at least enthralling. With a love story that feels lukewarm and drawn out (with limited chemistry between the actors), I wondered why the film couldn’t have highlighted Mary Anning’s exciting and groundbreaking career instead of centering her story on a romance that never happened.
Ammonite Movie Analysis – Plot Summary
Ammonite takes us to the 1840s, toward the end of Mary Anning’s (Kate Winslet) life, where the fossil hunter is living with her mother and running a tourist shop in Lyme Regis, Dorset. One day, her routine is broken when geologist, Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), visits her shop and offers the reluctant Mary compensation for a lesson in fossil hunting. While his career advances, he finds his wife, Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), in a melancholic state. Advising her to convalesce by the seaside, he insists on her staying behind under Mary’s care and tutelage while he goes on an expedition for six weeks.
Mary is again reluctant, but takes the young woman in and, over the course of their weeks together, learns to care about Charlotte. Their romance leads to Charlotte’s recovery and a renewed joy for the solitary Mary. As their romance blooms, the viewer is kept wondering whether these people from very different worlds can stay together.
It is Not Ammonite’s Narrative That’s Flawed Per Se
The issue I have with Ammonite is not the LGBT themed narrative set in the 1800s. It’s the fact that this story could have been told without making a biographical claim and including Mary Anning’s name at all. That said, in the case of a film like Wild Nights with Emily (2018) it’s a little easier to accept the bending of truth when there is at least a few, scant shreds of evidence that Emily Dickinson may have had a strong affection for her sister-in-law. Besides that, the film is a comedy, which gives it a certain license for hyperbole for the sake of a laugh.
In the case of Ammonite, however, the film is a drama that aims to make a strong case against the patriarchal values of the time by portraying Roderick Murchison as an inconsiderate, manipulative patriarch, who rules over his dissatisfied wife, Charlotte. From the get-go, this portrayal seemed like only a partial truth with some caricaturesque qualities. And when Charlotte, a fairly prim, sheltered young woman, charges head-on into her first lesbian relationship, it struck me as lacking in subtly and believability. It was insultingly conspicuous that the director had a political message to send.
A Biographical Film Doesn’t Have to be Either Left-Wing or Right-Wing
Despite receiving criticisms from some of Mary Anning’s distant relatives, Francis Lee defends his creative decisions by saying that queer history has been “routinely straightened out” and so it is now fair to rework a historical narrative to represent a queer interpretation. But the biggest issue I see with Lee’s argument is that he’s tacitly promoting a vicious cycle of revisionist history. He is saying, in essence, that ideology should reign above accuracy if it’s the right ideology.
Mary Anning’s sexuality remains a mystery, however. There’s no reason to assume she was straight, queer, or asexual because the information available to us doesn’t point definitively to any conclusion. But much like the films after the Hays Code of 1934, a political agenda is taking precedence in cinema. In Old Hollywood, conservative messages proliferated and the censors saw to it that edgier material was scrubbed clean before a film’s release. Today, despite my own belief in social justice issues, I see many films that are trying so strongly to tell me what to think that it still irks me even if I already agree with them in principle.
Mr. Turner (2014), a biopic on artist J.M.W Turner is, perhaps, one of the more neutral biopics in recent years. It showed us that the camera can follow a historical figure’s life with no overt judgments being made. It would be difficult to even describe Mr. Turner as a dramatization due to its relentlessly detached tone. Even though I haven’t researched the film extensively, it’s probably fair to say that there were embellishments here and there in Mr. Turner as well. Such things can’t be avoided when one attempts to piece together a fluid narrative out of disparate records. But instead of slipping moderate embellishments into the story, whilst limiting bias when possible, many biopics unapologetically embrace repainting history with broad, bold strokes.
A Woman of Science Whose Story is Still Untold in Pop Culture – Analysis of Ammonite
Ironically, Ammonite is designed with a feminist message in mind, but it tells us only what the man who directed it wanted us to think about her life, and he mostly ignored other aspects of her personal life and career development. I was left wondering at multiple points during the film, “what drove her to this level of passion and was she always so solitary and aloof?” These questions were left unanswered over the course of this glacially slow film–whose length feels an hour longer than it actually is.
Imagine what a story about Mary Anning’s adolescence would have been like; or an exploration of her denied entry into the scientific community, along with a detailed look at the lucrative aspects of her career. Such a film might have been more dynamic and closer to the truth than the one we got from Francis Lee. And ultimately, because he stretched the truth so thinly, Mary Anning’s story still isn’t widely circulated among the American populace.
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