Five movies about lesbians, with a brief review of “Ammonite”

Yesterday I watched the new movie Ammonite, loosely based on the life of Mary Anning (1799-1847), famous as one of the first women paleontologists and fossil collectors, as well as an influential scientist whose ambit was limited because of her sex. Anning found some of the best pterosaur and plesiosaur skeletons known, though details of her private life are sketchy. Ammonite attempts to fill in those details by confecting a romance between Anning and a rich London lady put out to apprentice with her, a completely made-up story for which there’s not a scintilla of evidence. But never mind—it’s fiction, Jake.

I realized, after I watched the movie, that it was one of five good movies I watched in the last year about lesbian relationships. All are worth watching, and in all of them (and I’ll try not to give spoilers), a married/betrothed woman falls in love with a lesbian, and lives get overturned.

Here are the movies in order of when they were made. After a brief review of Ammonite, I’ll rank them from best to worst and show the official trailers. But I think all are worth watching (except perhaps Ammonite, which, despite its star power, isn’t that great, but certainly better than the comic book/sci fi/chase movies that dominate the screen):

Carol (2015), starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara
Disobedience (2017), starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams
My Days of Mercy (2017) starring Ellen (now Elliot) Page and Kate Mara
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), starring Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel
Ammonite (2020), starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan

I’m not a professional critic, so all I can do is give a layperson’s take on Ammonite. A very brief plot summary, with a little bit of a spoiler: Mary Anning (played by Kate Winslet), who lives with her mother in Lyme Regis, is a solitary and dedicated woman, collecting and selling fossils on the Jurassic coast. A gentleman drops into her shop to buy a fossil and then asks to follow her around and watch her work, for a fee. Anning, unwilling to have her routine disrupted, refuses.

The man returns with his wife, Charlotte Murchison (played by Saoirse Ronan), asking Anning to help relieve her malaise (perhaps caused by a miscarriage) by letting Charlotte apprentice with her instead, for Charlotte has been prescribed quiet and sea air. After Charlotte collapses, Anning takes her in and, gradually, teaches her the way of fossil collecting. Slowly, the women fall in love and then have sex, depicted rather graphically. After a month or so, Charlotte’s “rest cure” is ended and her husband summons her back to London.

Charlotte, unable to live without Anning, asks her to London, intending Charlotte to live with her and her husband, something Charlotte doesn’t know when she visits. Dedicated to her work as always, Anning turns down the live-in offer, but the ending is ambiguous—and that’s all I’ll say. (I’ll add, though, that, save for one of the movies, the endings of all these films are ambiguous.)

Of all the movies in the list above, Ammonite is to me the least satisfying. For one thing, it gives short shrift to Anning’s paleontological work. Yes, it shows her striding the shores near Lyme Regis, and finding and preparing fossils, but says little else about her science save a few-seconds shot of one of her fossils being labeled with a credit to a man.  To a scientist, at least, the dearth of science in the movie is disturbing. And I’ll add that it should be disconcerting to others, too, for, after all, why should we care about Mary Anning?

For if she was not the famous paleontologist she was, this would be a rather slow-moving and unengaging story of a romance. Given the dour personality portrayed by Winslet, there are few sparks, and while the sex scenes are, let us say, “vigorous,” one doesn’t feel drawn into the romance. The passion between the women, aside from the sex, seems laid on rather than growing from the story itself. That the romance is a fictional one doesn’t help, either.

Granted, both Winslet and Ronan are superb actors (both are Oscar nominees, with Winslet winning one), and give creditable performances; but the almost psychotic nature of new love, evident in the other four films, is missing. That’s what I mean by lack of “spark”. Perhaps British lesbians in the early 19th century were, in private, subdued in this way, but I can’t bring myself to believe that. Love is love, and should be even more passionate when it’s forbidden.

So that’s my brief review. Yes, see the movie, but don’t expect to be blown away. I’d put it at the bottom of my ranking of the five movies above. Here’s my ranking of all five from best to worst.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire.  I may be the odd person out here, but I think this movie is a masterpiece—one of the best I’ve seen in quite a few years. I wrote a brief review here.

Carol

Disobedience (perhaps ranked too highly because it’s about Orthodox Judaism and thus has a special interest for me. It’s not far behind Carol.)

My Days of Mercy

Ammonite

And here are the trailers for all the movies, with two for Ammonite.  If you’ve seen any of these movies, please weigh in below.

Ammonite:

Disobedience:

Portrait of a Lady on Fire:

Carol:

My Days of Mercy: