THE DIG (2021)
Directed by Simon Stone
Netflix, 112 minutes PG-13
★★★★
Among the drawbacks of the dwindling number of cinemas is that movies are now subject to bidding wars by competing streaming platforms. Too often, decent movies get overlooked if you don’t subscribe to the service that distributes it. Such a film is The Dig, made by Clerkenwell Films but distributed by Netflix.
It really is about a dig, an archaeological one involving the spectacular trove from Sutton Hoo in the Suffolk region of England. It came to light in 1939, quite literally on the eve of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. There were 18 mounds on the Sutton Hoo estate of Edith Pretty (1883-1942), a widow enriched twice over from her father’s bequest and that of her husband Robert, who died in 1934. Pretty was unconventional. She gave birth to a son–also named Robert–when she was 47 and, though she had a massive estate and a house full of servants, she bristled at stuffy pretense. When offered a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), Britain’s highest honor, she refused it.
As this story unfolds, Pretty (Carey Mulligan) hires excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to determine whether the mounds contain anything historically significant. She has a hunch about a particular mound, but Brown steers in another direction before a near tragedy steers him back to Pretty’s choice. Sure enough, Brown begins to uncover what he think is a 6th century Anglo-Saxon ship. How did it get there and why is it so complex? Prevailing wisdom held that no Dark Ages society had much to offer culturally. But what would Brown know; he’s only an excavator, not a trained archaeologist. Forget that he’s a roughhewn autodidact with more experience and publications than a lot of university-trained experts.
Word gets out about the ongoing work and a team of Cambridge scholars led by Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) arrives like a cloud of locusts to take over from Brown. Pretty stalls as long as she can–the experts must wait to see if human remains are present–but they bully themselves in and an insulted Brown pedals back to his farm and his understanding wife May (Monica Dolan). Luckily, he is convinced to come back as he’s right; it’s an Anglo-Saxon site, not Viking.
In the movie a neophyte digger named Peggy Piggott (Lily James) unearths a Merovingian coin that proves Brown’s thesis and before you know it, they are pulling gold out of the ground like so many turnips. Peggy’s story is overlaid by her disintegrating marriage to Stuart (Ben Chaplin) and her attraction to Pretty’s cousin Rory Lomax (Johnny Flynn), who is about to be called up by the Royal Air Force.
Nitpickers objected that Peggy was actually highly qualified and that Lomax is an invented character. Lily James is perhaps too beautiful for the role of Peggy, but her nephew John Preston wrote the novel upon which The Dig is based, so I’ll give that a pass. It’s clearly stated from the outset that the film is adapted from a novel. Memo to Nitpickers: Novel = fiction. There are other things in the film that didn’t happen either. Edith Pretty died in 1942, not in 1939, and in a hospital, not the hollow of the Anglo-Saxon ship. Remarkably, though, most of the rest is pretty close to what actually occurred.
I suppose one might also object to liberties taken on the sentimental side of things–Peggy didn’t divorce Stuart until 1956, and young Robert is depicted overly much as an adorable and precocious 12-year-old–but the battle for control over the Sutton Hoo treasures was real and the academic community and the British Museum did indeed try to write Brown out of the story. (He wasn’t fully acknowledged until 1985.)
For whatever inaccuracies seep into The Dig, director Simon Stone knows a good story when it’s handed to him, and that actors like Mulligan, Fiennes, James, Stott, and Dolan don’t need much coaxing to give believable performances. Cinematographer Mike Ely adds lovely shots of Suffolk that capture well its sunny day/teeming rain contrasts. I wouldn’t call The Dig a masterpiece, but it does what it intended and does it well. If you can find The Dig, it’s a diverting way to spend two hours. There’s no way to exaggerate the importance of Sutton Hoo, as I discovered the several occasions I gazed upon the finds in the British Museum.
Rob Weir
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