'Ammonite' review: Kate Winset and Saoirse Ronan star in portrait of two ladies on fire

Because the world cannot possibly handle two same-sex love stories in corsets, released several months apart, “Ammonite” may have a hard time getting noticed in the wake of Celine Sciamma’s 2019 superb drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

That said: Kate Winset and Saiorse Ronan are very good in a fairly good, slightly stiff second feature by writer-director Francis Lee. It’s a methodical account of gradually consuming passion, taking as its subject the real-life British paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847), a lifelong resident and fossil hunter in Lyme Regis, along the English Channel on the Dorset coast of England.

The area, now known as the Jurassic Coast, yielded some extraordinary fossils, and does still. “Ammonite,” named after what Merriam-Webster defines as “a subclass of extinct cephalopods especially abundant in the Mesozoic age,” imagines an Anning affair with a visiting ringleted beauty, a sheltered younger woman who is grieving over a lost child, unhappily married and ready to make a discovery of her own.

Anning’s reputation (one “sea lizard” fossil, we learn in the prologue, sits behind museum glass in London) is at once firmly established and not much financial compensation. Played by Winslet, Mary thrives on solitude, and her work. She lives close to the water with her ailing mother (Gemma Jones), whose troubling cough keeps Anning awake nights and in a perpetual state of scowling sleep deprivation, relieved only by the sea.

Destiny calls in the form of the well-off, well-starched Murchisons, Charlotte and Roderick (Ronan and James McArdle). The gentleman is discreetly star-struck by Anning, a fellow paleontologist, and he proposes to pay her for some on-the-job tutelage. Then, in a second mercantile transaction, Charlotte ends up in the Annings’ reluctant but paid care while Roderick travels on business. The screenplay focuses on the six weeks Charlotte and Mary spend in a steadily warming orbit around each other.

The film handles the sensuality with easy frankness, after a long simmer. Unlike “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” though, it’s mostly boilerplate and predictable connective tissue before they get together by candlelight and in between the trysts. Fiona Shaw, playing one of the script’s real-life characters, Elizabeth Philpot, portrays the woman who, as the film suggests, based on existing correspondence, may have been Mary’s first lover.

“Ammonite” writer-director Lee drops hints like little anvils about the carnality on the horizon. One doctor, we hear, has prescribed Charlotte some “rest,” “sea bathing” and light “stimulation.” Another doctor (Alec Secareanu) notes the remarkable improvement in Charlotte’s condition and her “radiant” skin tone. “Try not to excite yourself,” he says, in one of the film’s few laugh lines.

What’s missing is the vital emotional turbulence of Sciamma’s modern classic, or of any three-dimensional story of passion and feeling. The compensations here are smaller, but they’re welcome, too; they’re more about two fine actresses digging for what’s underneath the obvious contours.

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‘AMMONITE’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: R, for graphic sexuality, some graphic nudity and brief language

Running time: 2 hours

Playing: Now playing where theaters are open; available Dec. 4 on VOD platforms.

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