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By Francesca Steele

NEON

Ammonite, a new film about fossil hunter Mary Anning from Francis Lee (the director of 2017’s much-praised God’s Own Country), is unhurried in a way that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But then again, neither was the fieldwork essential to the burgeoning science of palaeontology in the 19^th century.

Fossil collection can be a slow and sometimes boring business, which is presumably why so many men of learning left Anning – poor, working class, self-educated – to do much of the work involved in excavation, then took all the credit when the items were displayed in London museums.

The film’s opening is also a little slow at times, but it is right to pay heed to the labour-intensive nature of this vital work. We meet Anning (Kate Winslet) as she scales the cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset, UK. Her skirts are tucked between her legs and a harsh wind whistles by as she tugs at rocks lodged deep within the clay, often tumbling down the slope before she has secured anything worthwhile. It is hard, solitary graft.

Back in her studio, she brushes ammonites and other small fossils for tourists to buy. The 5-metre ichthyosaur skeleton she famously unearthed aged just 12 has already been transported far away to the capital, its bones under glass, bearing someone else’s name. Unlike many of her peers, Anning must earn a living, and because of her class and sex, she doesn’t have access to the scientific societies that would elevate her position.

She lives alone with her crotchety mother in a tiny, freezing cottage. Their life is quiet, although crashing waves and harsh winds roar around her on the beach and creep in the window cracks – Ammonite’s sound design is one of its finest features.

Into one of these quiet days come Mr and Mrs Murchison. Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) is a geologist –in real life, he first identified the geological time period known as the Silurian system – who wishes to learn from Anning. His wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) is suffering from “mild melancholia”, which seems to have been brought on by childlessness.

In reality, Charlotte was indeed friends with Anning, but was also a lively geologist and was in some ways responsible for her husband’s successes. Here, she is a fragile creature, lonely in her marriage. We see her reaching for a husband who tells her he misses his “fun” wife, before leaving her in Lyme Regis to recuperate as he goes off on his European tour, paying the Annings to watch over her.

Ronan and Winslet do some nuanced, career-best work here. Trussed up in their Victorian petticoats and cumbersome bonnets, the dialogue often painfully sparse, they must act predominantly with their faces. It would have been easy to overplay everything as a result, but instead it is their reserve that moves us – a discreet look of curiosity here, a secret smile there.

Winslet’s transformation from gruff loner to passionate lover is particularly fine. Initially unhappy at being lumbered with a frail gentlewoman, their friendship takes her by surprise. She has convinced herself she needs isolation, even enjoys it, when in reality she has had no choice. Women at this time either had to be owned or alone. This a story about Victorian misogyny and female friendship more than it is about Anning herself.

From here, the film departs radically from fact. After Anning nurses her new friend back to health following a fever, the two find comfort in each other’s bodies. The sex scenes are incredibly beautiful, delicately acted and shot with the focus on the power of touch rather than gratification. The film really comes to life in these moments, after a laboured start that might well represent quotidian reality but that may initially put some audiences off.

However, it isn’t so much the film’s pace or infidelity to fact that are most likely to disappoint, but rather the scant attention it pays to Anning’s actual achievements. Anya Pearson, a trustee of Mary Anning Rocks, a charity campaigning for a statue of Anning to be built in Lyme Regis, praises the portrayal of the “horrendous slog of fieldwork” but says of the film: “I do think it uses Anning as a vessel. It could have been any two women in this romance. There’s actually very little palaeontology.”

Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis. Her father, a carpenter, supplemented his income by collecting “curios” from the local cliffs and taught his daughter to do the same. As well as her childhood discovery of an ichthyosaur, she also found the first complete plesiosaur in her twenties. Although today she is sometimes credited with finding dinosaurs, the fossils Anning discovered on the Jurassic Coast were all marine reptiles, a separate prehistoric species.

Paul Barrett at the Natural History Museum in London says: “Mary was an extraordinary fossil collector, who found hundreds of scientifically important fossils in what was to become a boom time in palaeontology, when it moved from being a hobby for people collecting ‘natural curiosities’ to a science. Relatively little was known about fossils before this. They were usually given supernatural explanations.”

Anning’s work helped form a bedrock for Darwin’s. “Anning saw these creatures and realised they couldn’t possibly have lived within the time frame that the Bible suggested for existence,” says Tori Herridge, paleontologist and co-founder of TrowelBlazers, a website that celebrates the forgotten stories of women in geology, palaeontology and archeology. “She found belemnites, a prehistoric kind of squid, and noticed how closely their ink sacs resembled that of the modern squid, indicating that one might have evolved from the other. She was a talented analyst with a good eye for anatomy as well as fieldwork.”

“Anning was not a lone pioneer – many of her male and female contemporaries also contributed heavily to these changing ideas of how the world evolved. But in a funny sort of way, Anning was the only professional because she was actually earning a living. Many of her counterparts did this more as a genteel hobby,” she says.

It is a myth that Anning was a loner or underrated within her lifetime, says Herridge. “In some ways, her achievement is the very fact that she was acknowledged at the time, given cultural constraints.” In 1838, after Anning found herself destitute following a bad investment, the Geological Society (which didn’t accept women as members and had previously excluded Anning from a meeting about her own plesiosaur discovery) actually granted her an annual annuity – a sort of pension, illustrating the high regard in which she was held.

She had plenty of friends too. Charlotte Murchison seems unlikely to have been her lover (and was actually older, not younger, as suggested in Ammonite), but the two did exchange many letters over the years. Indeed, many of Anning’s friends were the wives of the men who came to consult her – Mary Buckland, for example, wife of the president of the Geological Society, William Buckland.

Numerous letters between Anning and Murchison, Buckland and Frances Bell, a teenager to whom Anning taught fossil hunting and on whom her Ammonite lover was originally thought to have been based, can be read at the Natural History Museum and elsewhere. Contemporaries described Anning as “shrewd”, “a strong, energetic spinster” and “rather satirical”. The antisocial person portrayed by Winslet seems a long way from the vivacious character who appears intermittently in her friends’ descriptions.

“I think what’s quite interesting about Anning is that she writes rarely about herself, and much more about her work,” says Herridge. “It’s her friends who relay stories of her good sense of humour and so on. And because of that, there’s quite a gap between what we really know and what we have to guess at, which means we can all imagine Anning, to a certain extent, however we choose.”

Ammonite is released in the US on 13 November. The UK release date has yet to be announced. It played at the London Film Festival in October.