Stéphane Fontaine's cinematography works hard at bleeding washed-out shades through a location where even the food – mushrooms, the most grey of all foods, for luncheon – tends towards pathetically fallacious monochrome. Lee has as sound a grasp of rain-blasted Lyme Regis as he did of mud-splattered Yorkshire in God's Own Country. Seeing the finished film, one finds oneself wondering if the modern-day Anning family members might have had a point, though there is plenty to savour. In real life, Murchison, played here by 26-year-old Saoirse Ronan, was a decade older than Anning, who is given grim presence by 45-year-old Kate Winslet, but it's not as if Cleopatra looked much like Elizabeth Taylor.Īnd yet. It is true that the film-makers in this instance have also reversed the age difference.

Who really cares? Since the time of Sir Walter Scott – and long before that – creators of historical entertainments have been tweaking and poking what we naively call 'the facts'. There is no evidence whatsoever that the two were romantically entangled. A year or so ago, when Francis Lee, director of the excellent God's Own Country (in which a new arrival to a rainy part of England had a passionate same-sex relationship with Gemma Jones' grumpy offspring), announced that his next project (in which a new arrival to a rainy part of England has a passionate same-sex relationship with Gemma Jones' grumpy offspring) was to hang around Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison, two admired 19th-century fossil-hunters, at least one relative of the former raised polite objections.

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