Ammonite (2020)

While watching this movie, my youngest son said (and I quote): “This movie is really boring…and kind of depressing. … To be honest, Mom, it’s really right up your alley!” He was not wrong on several counts. I read Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, a story loosely based on the life of Mary Anning, and thought this movie might tell me more about this remarkable woman. She grew up in extreme poverty in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. She and her brother were the only children to survive out of eight children born. Her father took them both fossil hunting on the beach and they sold what they found to visiting tourists. At the age of eleven she found an entire icthyosaurus skeleton, and had the dinosaur named after her--she went to see it once on display in the British Museum. She got little to no credit for her self-taught skills as a scientist while she was alive, having left school at a young age to help support her family. This is a speculative story about how Mary Anning, a woman who never married, might have had a romantic relationship with a woman that she was definitely friends with and corresponded with over many years. Anning is portrayed as bitter, silent, and less interestying than her real life accomplishments would lead you to beleive.