AMMONITE (AMAZON PRIME)

Profoundly poetic. Director Francis Lee’s achingly pure love tale, starring Kate Winslet as paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) and Saoirse Ronan as her lover, Charlotte Murchison is beautifully unsettling; the rawness of a landscape, accommodating to ancient fossils, unsympathetic to earthlings, intensifies the relationship between two outliers; misfits that bond over weeks spent probing for artifacts long dead, tainted only by the ravages of timeless, mercurial nature. Rivaling the naked pungency of “Blue is the Warmest Color” (2013) and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”(2019), Winslet’s, fervent drawing of a brilliant scientist is her personal best; wordlessly, her demeanor conveys the isolation of diligence; alone and unerringly pursuing her craft, the torturous pain of a misfit, awkward in the restricted wardrobe of the nineteenth century; a pinnacle has been eclipsed. Ronan transcends her previous characterizations (“Lady Bird”, “Little Women”, “Brooklyn”) as poignantly perfect, joyful, breathless young Charlotte, with pristine clarity she, without bias, recognizes Mary’s virtuoso, and loves. Their natural and unassuming pairing, adulation evolves in unaffected, refined wonderment gifting viewers a mammoth tour de force, an ammonite, an aural sealed, enshrined in filmic anthology.

FIVE STARS!!!!!

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