‘Locked Down’ mirrors our quarantine life

An energetic romantic comedy-slash-heist movie

Doug Liman’s “Locked Down,” one of the first and most ambitious films to be conceived and shot during the pandemic, is, like our own quarantine experiences, erratic, a little absurd and sporadically delightful.

Unlike our time in quarantine, it has Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. This, not a small difference, is crucial in “Locked Down,” an energetic romantic comedy-slash-heist movie that makes a game entry into the emerging genre of COVID-19 movies. Liman, the director of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” “The Edge of Tomorrow” and “The Bourne Identity,” has always, in a movie world of lumbering, oxygen-depleted action films, had a knack for more agile and playful films that give A-list performers ample room to breathe.

That serves “Locked Down” well, with Hathaway and (especially) Ejiofor making a charming pair, even as they play a couple that, just before lockdown began, have had it with each other. The script is by Steven Knight (“Eastern Promises,” “Peaky Blinders”), who penned an early breakout for Ejiofor in the very good, London-set “Dirty Pretty Things.” Knight wrote “Locked Down,” which debuted Thursday on HBO Max, in July, and by September, they were filming in London with COVID on-set protocols -mainly shooting in a townhouse, on empty city streets and a culminating scene at Harrods. That things build to a semi-ridiculous heist is fitting; the whole movie feels stolen.

It also feels very March-April 2020. There are pajama pants, baking plans and Zoom calls (Ben Stiller, Ben Kingsley and Mindy Kaling make remote cameos playing characters seen only through the computer screen). “Locked Down” points to one problem of pandemic movies: So much has changed so fast that some of the novelties of last spring now feel dated and stale.

But seeing two terrific performers like Ejiofor and Hathaway in such circumstances lends them a far less familiar glamour. Knight’s lively and verbose script (he also wrote the even-more-confined “Locke”) gives the actors a kind of quarantine-screwball atmosphere rich in claustrophobia and shut-in frustration. The experience is causing Linda (Hathaway) and Paxton (Ejiofor) to doubt much in their lives. Linda, who has initiated the break-up, runs the London division of a global corporation. After being ordered to fire her staff by Zoom, she begins to question her career. Paxton’s never got going. A biker and poet who occasionally reads to his locked-down block from the middle of the street, he’s never risen above delivery man, his record tarnished by a long-ago crime.

For a while, they’re both monologuing around the house in between videoconference confessions, but their existential distress eventually syncs up, and “Locked Down” — like someone finally settling into a pandemic rhythm — takes shape.

“Locked Down” is inevitably, and intentionally, of the moment. But I hope some of its off-the-cuff spirit lasts after the pandemic. So much Hollywood moviemaking is laboriously preordained. The largest studios have release calendars planned out years in advance. Little is spontaneous and, as a consequence, films that feel connected to their time are hard to find at the studio level. Hopefully the COVID-made movie is soon a relic, but its fleet-footedness sticks around.

“Locked Down,” a Warner Bros. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for language throughout and some drug material. Running time: 118 minutes. Three stars out of four.

The new film “Ammonite” unearths the stories of two women buried by history: paleontologist Mary Anning, who in the 19th century made significant prehistoric fossil discoveries along the coast in Southwest England, and geologist Charlotte Murchison, who worked in the area briefly alongside her geologist husband.

But instead of illuminating what we know about Mary and Charlotte and their work, in “Ammonite,” writer-director Francis Lee (“God’s Own Country”) takes a footnote from their lives — that they worked together a bit and became friends. While that’s an inspired idea for a piece of historical fiction, “Ammonite” is a mixed bag: exquisitely beautiful, with committed and lived-in performances, but also a dreary and oddly empty experience.

Kate Winslet, stripped down and serious, plays Anning, who lives with her mother (Gemma Jones) and is struggling to get by. Life (if you can call it that) in the coastal area of Lyme Regis is harsh, and you can see the toll it’s taken in her eyes and hardened face. Although she’s notable in her field, she doesn’t get to socialize with the men in the Geological Society of London. Instead, she toils in silence in her hometown, searching for fossils in the cliffs and shilling her findings to curious tourists for meager sums.

Then geologist Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) stops by her shop and asks her to take him out so he can see the world the way she sees it. It’s admiration cloaked in unconscious condescension: He assumes Mary can and will hand over her lifetime of work and expertise in an afternoon on the beach. Behind him is his wife, Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), cloaked in black and a figurative shadow of a person. Mary barely takes notice of her.

The real Charlotte was a fellow woman of science a decade older than Mary. But in Lee’s version, she’s the young and fragile wife of a busy man. She has suffered a loss and is fading away into her own depression.

Roderick says he wants his “bright, funny, clever wife back,” but he also treats her as a delicately wilting flower. You wonder if part of her mental state is due to the fact that he’s the type of husband who orders a decadent meal for himself and then puts in for plain white fish, no sauce, for his wife.

He decides she shouldn’t accompany him further on his travels, and pays Mary to take Charlotte out with her instead. Mary is insulted but grudgingly accepts. She needs the money. With their differences in age, social status and interests, Mary and Charlotte are an unlikely pair. But after a fever and convalescence, they have an intense affair that awakens both, briefly.

Perhaps that’s because Lee’s script is so spare, and there’s only so much an actor can do to fill in the gaps. A film like this should give life to its characters and reveal essential truths beyond the book-report versions of their existence. But “Ammonite” keeps you at a distance on a rather vacant, but beautiful, journey.

“Ammonite,” a Neon release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “some graphic nudity, graphic sexuality and brief language.” Running time: 120 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four. (AP)