#Ammonite cast movie

If that sounds like another metaphor, rest assured, it can’t be accidental, although the movie never follows through on the notion of Mary being split open. To the untrained eye, the stones Mary identifies might look like nothing more than useless rubble, belched up by the sea, but she has been doing this long enough to recognize which of these rocks contain splendid prehistoric specimens, hidden deep inside. To be more specific, Mary lives - with her fussy mother (Gemma Jones), crushed by past loss - and works in a dingy seaside shop, from which she sells the ammonite fossils she collects along the beach (that much is factual).

There are the performances, for starters: Winslet seems to have swallowed a black hole’s worth of oppression and unhappiness as Mary, a staunch ascetic whose dour character has been calcified by self-reliance, while Ronan embodies the pale flower entrusted to her care, and in whose company Mary’s frosty exterior begins to thaw. Still, many audiences missed “Portrait” (a French film now available via The Criterion Collection), and there’s enough that’s unique about “Ammonite” to recommend it all the same. What Lee couldn’t have known when he undertook “Ammonite” was how the life he had chosen for Mary would pale in comparison with last year’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” a richer and considerably more articulate film extrapolated from a remarkably similar analogy - one where paint, rather than petrification, preserved a love story that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. The actual woman is but a shell onto which he can project whatever life he pleases, and what he pleases is to believe that such a person may have found the strength to love another woman - embodied here by an unusually fragile Saoirse Ronan - at a time when such relationships were all but forbidden. That there’s little evidence to suggest the real Mary Anning was queer or repressed doesn’t discourage the actor-turned-auteur in the slightest. In Lee’s eyes, Mary may have suffered from the lack of lesbian role models, but in his hands, she emerges as the sort of figure that she herself might have needed in order to more fully embrace her sexuality.

Little is known about this woman, whose expertise was largely self-taught, and into this void steps filmmaker Francis Lee, imagining a life that turns Mary into a hardy proto-feminist pioneer. Set on the overcast coast of Lyme Regis, circa 1840, the film centers on a real person, amateur paleontologist Mary Anning - played by a remarkably committed, totally unselfconscious Kate Winslet - who spent her days collecting and cleaning such fossils for tourists. Named for that species of spiral-shaped mollusk its heroine finds petrified along England’s southern shores, dreary yet daring “ Ammonite” has this metaphor very much in mind. When critics say, “Representation matters,” this is why: Art - but also artifacts, including diaries, portraiture and possessions that belonged to real people - creates a kind of fossil record of those who preceded you, offering evidence that others have faced the same questions.

If you don’t see anyone like you in a seemingly heterogeneous - and heteronormative - society, it’s hard to feel anything other than deviant, out of step and alone. No matter the culture, no matter the century, one of the great obstacles facing LGBT people through time has been the virtual invisibility of those who have come before.

Ammonite cast