Ammonite (2020) | Happiest Season (2020) | Gentleman Jack S01
Ammonite: UK 2020
Directed by Francis Lee; starring Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Fiona Shaw…
Happiest Season: USA 2020 (Apple TV+)
Directed by Clea DuVall; starring Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Mary Steenburgen, Victor Garber, Dan Levy, Aubrey Plaza…
Gentleman Jack S01
Created by Sally Wainwright; starring Suranne Jones, Sophie Rundle…
T’is the season for big holiday movies and by coincidence, or because it’s 2020 and the industry’s only a decade behind, two of this year’s biggest are lesbian themed romances. Ammonite is a period biography and gloomy art film while Happiest Season is a frothy romcom. Unfortunately, neither is very good.
NOTE: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR AMMONITE AND SOME MILD ONES FOR HAPPIEST SEASON.
Ammonite (UK 2020)
Ammonite focusses on the relationship between two actual, 19th Century women. Mary Anning (Winslet) was a pioneering scientist who made ground-breaking discoveries of sea fossils, and Charlotte Murchison (Ronan) was a wealthy friend and supporter. There’s no evidence the two were ever more than friends, but the film weaves a fictional romance around the known details of their lives.
As the story opens, Winslet’s Mary is a gloomy drudge, driven by scientific fervour to scour the cold, wet, dangerous, and wind-swept beaches and cliffs of Dorset. Denied admittance to the Geological Society because of her gender, she lives with her mother (also seeming to labour under some unspecified tragedy) and makes a scant living selling fossil specimens in her shop.
Almost completely dialogue-free, these scenes rely on a portentous visual style — all cold colours and rough textures to set the mood. There are a lot of lingering close-ups of rough female hands scrubbing things, muddy boots scuffing on rough wood floors, dirty brushes scraping fossils clean, and heavily clothed female bodies bent over in back breaking labour. To make up for the lack of spoken language, the ambient sound is cranked up whenever anything gritty or scratchy is happening (that is, most of the time).
Everything the movie shows us of the 19th Century makes the point that it was a hard, depressing time, especially for women, who do all the hard work. And, befitting the subject, we’re clearly meant to understand that this is a Very Important Film.
Ronan’s Charlotte Murchison turns up when her gormless husband visits Mary. He’s an amateur palaeontologist seeking to study with the renowned lady scientist. He’s a rich idiot, but the gloomy Mary needs the money and so lets him tag along on a few beach walks. By the time he’s ready to leave for a scientific holiday on the continent, Charlotte is too sick to travel and gets left behind. In truth, she’s not so much ill as despairing in the wake of a miscarriage. When the prescribed medicine of sea air (on the stormy beach) and bathing in the (freezing) sea water almost kills her, she ends up in the care of the reluctant Mary.
At first the two brusque and silent women barely tolerate one another. As Charlotte recovers, though, she begins to walk the shore with Mary and help with the fossil hunting – either from boredom or because of some previously undetected scientific interest. Soon the two are working together to shift obstacles too big for one of them (metaphor alert!) and giving each other significant glances.
Still, it’s a surprise when this silent companionship erupts into a passionate physical affair. Perhaps the movie’s point is that forbidden love is the only way Mary and Charlotte can burst free of the personal tragedies and gender restrictions oppressing them. I might not be the best guy to judge here (the operative word being “guy”) but, given that their relationship has so far consisted of little more than soulful stares, this sudden transformation into lovers feels artificial and un-earned. Of course, hoity-toity “Art” films resort to unearned plot developments like this all the time, and routinely seem to get away with lazy storytelling that would be roundly (and rightly) criticized in a more commercial film.
Given Ammonite’s emphasis on the period’s sexual conformity and subordination of women, it’s also remarkable how quickly and without hesitation Mary and Charlotte jump into bed together. It would help if we knew something of their inner lives, but the slow unveiling of past tragedies has been the movie’s main form of character development. In consequence, they remain more feminine archetypes or symbolic representations than actual living, breathing individuals whose motivations we can understand (we never really hear a conversation between them, for example).
Charlotte’s husband eventually returns from his travels and summons her home, seeming to end the affair as abruptly as it began. Ammonite makes a time jump, though, for an epilogue’s worth of additional unearned plot developments that open the possibility for an ongoing connection. That this scene begins with a misunderstanding between Mary and Charlotte is a useful reminder of how little these supposed lovers know of each other (or us of them). Typically, Ammonite then abandons literal storytelling for a resolution that has our two leads sharing a lingering glance while the camera focusses on a display of fossils between them that seems highly symbolic of… something.
All this is great fodder for English Lit Majors who can research Ammonites and write tedious essays about how such and such a fossil (metaphor alert, again!) symbolically maps our characters’ inner worlds. I’m old-fashioned enough, though, to still think a story consists of believable characters taking actions based on inner motivations and external events, and that without such a realistic foundation it can’t bear the weight of a metaphorical layer. For all its pretensions, Ammonite is just a slog.
Happiest Season (USA 2020)
Although its tone and setting are very different, Happiest Season also craps out of the hard work of character building in favour of delivering A Very Important Message.
The scene opens on a date night between Kristen Stewart’s Abby and Mackenzie Davis’s Harper. It’s supposed to be our introduction to them as a happy couple, but all we get are a few cutesy quirks. Then the action kicks off with a road trip to visit Harper’s waspish family for the holidays.
En route Harper confesses that she hasn’t come out to them yet. Not good as the two have been living in a long-term relationship for some time. Worse, she asks Abby to pretend to be just her roommate during the visit, so as not to disrupt the festivities.
All this is treated as a set up for romcom hijinks (we’re told that Abby is famously bad at lying). And Stewart does play the hapless Abby’s awkwardness with a deft, comic lightness. She is, indeed, bad at keeping secrets.
But the comic tone is soon out of step with an increasingly toxic situation. The sweet Abby suffers a series of humiliations as the family leaves “the roommate” out of important events and teases Harper publicly about the availability of various male suitors. Again and again Harper is given a chance to do the right thing, only to respond with serial cowardice.
It’s soon evident that Harper’s family is more than just a little uptight and repressed. In support of the father’s political ambitions, they have all — for many dysfunctional years — been forced to present an impossibly perfect image of conformity and respectability to the world. Such relentless hypocrisy has not only made Harper a moral coward but left both her sisters badly damaged.
From romcom froth we’re suddenly in a deadly serious “issues” movie (that would have felt timely in the 1990’s). The setting is small town U.S.A., so I suppose it’s just possible that a sophisticated, well-educated, upper middle-class family could be as uptight and oblivious as this one. But there are problems beyond the jarring changes in tone.
We’ve seen so little of their relationship that it’s a mystery why Abby would stay loyal to the awful Harper. Aside from the fact that they’re mega-cute together (Stewart and Davis do have great chemistry), why are they a couple? What are their common interests? Are there temperaments or beliefs compatible? What do they talk about when they’re alone? We have no idea. In a reversal of the “show don’t tell” rule of moviemaking, we’re expected to believe they’re in love because they say it so often.
Worse, having got very serious about how cowardly and dysfunctional Harper’s upbringing has made her, the movie fails to deal in any serious way with the issues raised. Instead, after briefly descending into misery porn, Happiest Season switches back to romcom mode. Several characters experience sudden personality transplants that (literally overnight) produce the understanding and growth required to resolve all their conflicts. It’s the kind of magical character growth – driven by the requirements of the plot – that Roger Ebert used to rail against. (He’s right; it’s the laziest kind of writing.)
Unlike Ammonite, there are at least some sparks of wit and fun to be had here – usually at the hands of the secondary characters. Dan Levy is amusing as the clichéd gay best friend. And Aubrey Plaza is terrific — both funny and relatable — as Harper’s secret home-town ex, whom Abby is alternately threatened and charmed by.
The Art of Storytelling
The main impression left by these movies, though, is how lazy both are. They seem to think a progressive social message is merit enough to skip the hard work of crafting a real story or relatable characters. (Christmas music is dreadful for a similar reason.)
The problem being that positive messages, or good intentions, have nothing to do with artistic merit. Whether it’s a novel, painting, sculpture, a movie, a work of art is a view into our shared existence, captured by the artist and shaped into a manufactured object. When we experience that work we have the opportunity to become participants in the creative act. The more actively we engage with it, the more fully we bring our own thoughts and experiences to bear, and the richer the combination of our perceptions and the artist’s vision becomes. This shared creation then reflects back on our own lives – a fresh perspective on who we are ourselves. The relevance, honesty, and urgency of this experience is the real measure of art (how “good” it is).
For narrative art, the manufactured object is a story, and stories draw us in by creating sympathetic, believable characters. These may be perky millennials, noir detectives, space bounty hunters, or… Victorian ladies. It matters not; if they’re psychologically realistic and interesting – if they’re believable people — they’ll stir a twitch of recognition within us, an empathetic response to their plight. When our fictional heroes navigate their experiences with recognizable emotions and dialogue, when they overcome obstacles through believable, organic growth, and when they confront their nemesis with only their own wits and resources, then their experiences resonate with the arcs of our own life. By imaginatively participating in their story, we find fellow travellers on our own journey.
The plots of real stories are moved by characters taking action based on believable motivations. No matter how outlandish the setting (space cowboys or kitchen sink drama) we relate to such organic story development because the people in it are believable and relatable. A well-told story is an utterly immersive visit to an invented world that lives in our imagination as an actual place populated by real people.
When these characters overcome burdens like to our own, we feel less alone. When they show the common humanity we share, they remind us that the human condition is universal. And when, through imaginative participation in the story, we meet people, see places, and have experiences beyond our everyday existence, our lives grow larger.
Stories don’t gain this power through well-reasoned arguments. And their insights into the human condition don’t come from logical analysis. Any power they have — any truth they tell — comes from their verisimilitude to living reality and the immersion that creates. The spell is broken as soon as a story gives its characters magical personality changes or using unearned and unbelievable plot developments to demonstrate the author’s political point of view. As soon as that happens, we know the tale is fake, that it has no connection to life as it’s actually lived. And why would we care about a fake story?
Politics is, indeed, the enemy of art.
Gentleman Jack
Rather than head into Christmas on a negative note, or imply that a romcon can’t be both progressive and good, I’ll end with a mention of Gentleman Jack. This is an HBO series from 2019 that also features an historical figure.
Anne Lister was a wealthy 19th Century gentlewoman who owned and managed a farming estate in Yorkshire. Unlike Mary Anning she actually was a lesbian in a time when this had to be kept very secret. This aspect of her life was only uncovered recently when the encoded pages of her voluminous diaries were decrypted.
The series picks up in 1832 with Lister (as everyone calls her) returning from travels abroad, determined to revive the fortunes of the family estate after a series of “scrapes” — failed affairs with various women who lacked the courage join her in an unconventional life. Soon, she’s collecting rents, firing tenants, and looking to sink a coal pit (it’s a rare treat to see what 19th Century aristocrats actually did all day!). If that wasn’t enough, she becomes distracted by meeting Ann Walker, a wealthy but retiring young neighbour (also an actual person).
When Lister decides to pursue Ann, we’re treated to an intimate, fly-on-the-wall view of the two getting to know and like one another. Unlike so many screen depictions of love, this one doesn’t cut away when the talking starts. Lister is an intelligent, lively polymath who has used her privileged status to get away with a metric tonne of eccentric behaviour (travelling, pursuing a scientific education, dressing in masculine clothing…) It’s easy to see why Miss Walker is captivated by her energy and charisma. And we also see that it is Miss Walker’s very decency and kindness that has made her a virtual prisoner of her avaricious family. She has lived a life of quiet desperation, but in Lister’s company she comes alive, showing a heretofore hidden wit and spirit. When Lister’s intended casual affair turns into something more for both of them, it’s easy to see why.
Gentleman Jack’s eight episodes (each an hour) provide plenty of room for this relationship to breathe and grow. But the series’ other great virtue is its full and sympathetic portrait of life in 19th Century Yorkshire. Lister’s servants, tenant farmers, and professional associates are all as vividly drawn as the main characters. Many of them have ambitions and story arcs of their own — in utter contrast to Ammonite’s cramped view of the period, which leaves out anything not in accord with its social agenda.
Even the repressive sexual mores of the time are shown with nuance and complexity. Some society doyens are all too ready to spread malicious gossip about what Lister and Miss Walker might be getting up to. But our couple also have friends, relatives, and acquaintances who genuinely like them and are loyal enough to look the other way (even some who may guess at more than they let on).
The darker side of the 19th Century isn’t sugar-coated, and provides plenty of obstacles, both personal and professional, for our lovers. This being Gentleman Jack, you can be sure there’ll be no magic personality transplants or unearned plot twists to smooth their way. They will have to struggle, learn from their mistakes, grow, and be brave if they are to find happiness together — just like real life! No spoilers as to how that turns out; it’s a story you should watch for yourself.
And that’s my recommendation. Unlike Ammonite or Happiest Season, which mostly waste their A-List casts, Gentleman Jack makes excellent use of a talented collection of British TV veterans. Suranne Jones (of Coronation Street and Scott & Bailey) is terrific as the energetic and charismatic Lister, while Sophie Rundle (of Peaky Blinders) more than holds her own in the quieter role. The whole series is directed with great verve, moving briskly to a rousing soundtrack. Even if you’re not interested in period or “relationship” dramas, Gentleman Jack is worth a look; it’s a lively, fun watch for anyone who enjoys a good story.
Ammonite: THUMB DOWN
Happiest Christmas: THUMB DOWN
Gentleman Jack: THUMB UP
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