Go Online to See The Trial of Chicago 7

 

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (2020)

Directed by Aaron Sorkin

Netflix, 130 minutes, R (language, drugs, bloodshed)

★★★★★

 

 

 

Like it or not–and I don’t–movies have been decoupled from cinemas. A while back, a friend told me I should see The Trial of the Chicago 7. I paid little heed because it was only available on Netflix Streaming, a platform I didn’t then have. He was right.  

 

If you doubt what I said about the declining importance of cinemas, consider that the above film made a measly $115,000 at the box office. Given that it cost $35 million to make, Chicago 7 is the biggest bombs in movie history, right? Wrong! It’s near the top of most-watched movies on Netflix. My friend also told me that Sacha Baron Cohen was superb in the film. I couldn’t imagine that, but he was right about that as well.

 

Chicago 7 is neither a documentary nor a faithful depiction of the days of Rage outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August 1968 or the five-month trial of dissidents that took place between September 1969 and February 1970. Anyone wishing to poke holes can do so. The opening montage shows events disconnected in time, the undercover agent tempting Jerry Rubin is fictional, women did not burn bras, the gentle giant Dave Dellinger never slugged anyone, defense attorney William Kunstler was more strident than depicted, Fred Hampton was murdered a month after Bobby Seale’s mistrial, and it was Dellinger, not Tom Hayden, who tried to read the names of Americans who died in Vietnam War during the trial.

 

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a “dramatization.” Surprisingly, by taking a few liberties, it communicates a kind of truth better than had it not. It encapsulates the good and bad about this period of American history. On the plus side, it’s a reminder of the youthful energy and idealism of the counterculture, not to mention its courage in confronting injustice, State-sanctioned violence, and the inherent stupidity of the Vietnam War. Yet it also shows the soil being tilled for a brand of American fascism embodied by Nixon and his thugs that ultimately yielded the reactionary social views of Ronald Reagan and the thuggery of Donald Trump and his deplorables who would tear down America rather than embrace multiculturalism.

 

The story arc stays close to reality. Bands of antiwar protestors descended on Chicago and Mayor Richard Daley, the spiritual father of Trump, ordered his minions to deny rally and camping permits. He also unleashed the Chicago Police–who earned their reputation for being Cossacks–to break heads. That, by the way, was the judgment of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton), not some Yippie. Chicago was a bloodbath that didn’t need to happen, but someone had to be blamed. Eight “co-conspirators” went on trial: pacifist Dave Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch); SDS leader Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne); peace activists Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), Lee Weiner, and John Froines; Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II); and Yippies Abbie Hoffman (Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong). Seale’s case was decoupled when his angry outbursts led Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) to order him bound and gagged.

 

It was a put-up job, as Kunstler (Mark Rylance) continually pointed out as he racked up many of the 175 contempt citations Judge Hoffman handed down. There was no conspiracy. Several of the defendants didn’t even know the others; others passionately disliked each other. The film does a good job of showing divisions within the New Left, especially those between politicos and self-styled revolutionaries. Judge Hoffman was a disgrace who was quietly put out to pasture after the trial; all of the convictions were eventually tossed. If the goal was to preserve the Establishment, the Chicago 7/8 case did more to undermine it than the Yippies could have ever done.

 

I again remind you that this film is not a faithful account. Defendants Hoffman, Rubin, and Seale were indeed disruptive, Judge Hoffman was worse than we see, assistant prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wasn’t as innocent as shown, etc. Nonetheless, the film’s sprawling cast was really topnotch. Sacha Baron Cohen was really good as Abbie Hoffman, a complicated mix of the clowning, defiance, and bursts of intelligence and depression. If I tell you that what actually happened was far worse than what is shown in the movie, you can imagine you witnessed Act One of America coming apart at the seams. You wouldn’t be wrong.

 

Rob Weir

 

PS: Can we please stop already with anachronistic outro music. The stuff from Celine is utter rubbish!

Book of Form and Emptiness is Brilliant

 

 

THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS (20210

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Penguin-Random House, 548 pages,

★★★★★

 

The Book of Form and Emptiness is an astonishing novel. Canadian-American author/filmmaker/Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki teaches creative writing at Smith College. It would hard to find a more imaginative instructor than she.

 

This novel defies categorization. There is a central story, but also mediations on the human condition, commodity fetishism, crows, Fukushima, alienation, writer Jorge Luis Borges, and German philosopher/critic Walter Benjamin, a Jew who killed himself rather than submit to being returned (from Spain) to Nazi Germany. Got that? Now forget it because these are mere threads in a broad tapestry.

 

The narrative involves the Oh family: Japanese/Korean jazz musician Kenji, his Caucasian wife Annabelle, and their 11-year-old son Benny, named after Benny Goodman. Ozeki is of Japanese and Caucasian descent and some of her experiences are likely embedded in her characters. She also lives part of the year in Vancouver, presumably the template for the West Coast city in which the Oh family lives. They don’t have a lot of money–jazz guys seldom do–but they have even less when a drunken Kenji falls asleep in the alley behind his rented apartment and is killed when a poultry truck runs him over.

 

That event triggers a downward spiral for Annabelle and Benny. She puts on weight and her job as a “clipper,” a person who scans papers for mentions of clients, becomes technologically redundant. She’s also a hoarder and a compulsive shopper who can’t resist anything from craft supplies to snow globes. She has to contend with her grief, potential homelessness, low self-esteem, and the possibility that Benny might be removed from her custody.

 

Benny has severe issues. Ozeki never explains–she trusts readers to construct their own truths–but Benny could be any one (or combination of) the following: autistic, brain-damaged, an empath, a mystic, schizophrenic, or simply shattered by his father’s death. He spends time in and out of “Pedipsy,” the pediatric psychology wing of the hospital, where he meets an older boy Mackson Chu, who helps him cope, but try being a kid with peers who know you’ve been in the “loony bin.”

 

Benny hears voices everywhere. Glass speaks to him, as do the crows Kenji used to feed, and even the numbers in a math book. Over time, he begins skipping school to avoid peers and spend his days in secret sections of a city library. He will befriend a homeless wheelchair-bound poet and philosopher called The Bottleman–for the bags of them that hang and spill from his chair–and his ferret-bearing acolyte, The Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet associated with the oneness of God. She is a slightly older than Benny and a street person who fancies herself a poet and artist. Benny is thoroughly smitten by her.

 

Does this novel sound unusual enough for you? Let’s go further. There are multiple narrators, including Annabelle, Benny past and present, a Zen priestess named Aikon devoted to uncluttering, and Benny’s therapist. When was the last time one of the narrators was the book itself? Book tells us, “In the beginning, before there was life, everything mattered.” Once life appeared, the world bifurcated into the Made and the Unmade and books became “the High Priests of the Made” with the “power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion, and even from death, and for a time, we books believed we could save you, too…. What folly.”

 

Ozeki unsettles us at every turn. Benny feels emotional, psychological, and physical pain throughout the novel, but so do others. Ozeki (via Benny) ponders Creation: “Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is formed. In this Unbound state … you encountered all that was and could be: form and emptiness and the absence of form of emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in.” But the planet is also in pain and Ozeki gently nudges us to ponder whether the end of the Anthropocene is nigh. Call it a metaphor inside of a conundrum. Ozeki (through Aikon) explodes conventional notions of value and in so doing, leads readers to consider what should be kept and what can be discarded.

 

Still, Ozeki is a priest but not a preacher. Her book opens with an epigram from Benjamin: “(According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies.” Yet later she asks whether the book she reads is the same as the one you read, even when it’s the same book.” If good questions are the key to insight, this is one wise novel. It also scores high on the literary scale. The ending might be a smidgen too saccharine, but I was so lost in thought that I scarcely noticed.

 

Rob Weir

 

Give ‘em a few States: April 2022 Satire

 

 

I’ve long thought that the United States is a fiction and we should figure out how to coexist short of war. If push came to shove, the West Coast would surely secede and do well on its own. The East Coast from Maryland to Maine would be tempted to join Canada, although New Hampshire is an obstacle; though it votes blue in POTUS elections, it’s a purple state. The same problem plagues the Upper Midwest. Minnesota is liberal and Michigan is mostly blue, but Wisconsin has a severe south (liberal) to north (deep-red) split.

 

The solution is to give the rightwing lollapaloozers some states all their own. Congress could allow conservative reservations to opt out of federal laws they find objectionable. They would not be forced to take any federal money, teach critical race theory, sanction gay marriage, get vaccinated, or allow any drugs except crystal meth. They would be free to shoot animals and each other with assault rifles, and could even reenact slavery–presumably of transgendered people.

 

How to winnow? I immediately thought of Texas, but it’s not necessarily a prime candidate. Austin is to the left of Lennons/Lenins John and Vladimir. Plus, its tech industry generates a lot of cash. Plus, San Antonio is a very brown town. Utah looks good as it has few people of color, but it’s Mormon and we knows they ain’t Christians, right?

 

I also thought of North and South Dakota, the first of which is 87% white and the latter 84%. The, however, like two other contenders, Oklahoma and Idaho (89% white with lots of gun crazies), have tough nuts to crack: Injuns. The ones in the Dakotas and Idaho are militant about water rights and pipelines running across sacred land. Oklahoma was once called Indian Territory and it simply has too many–more than 13% of its population–and there’s no nearby barren land to foist off on them.

 

Tennessee is out. Because. Memphis and Nashville. They’re filed with musicians, known socially parasitical bums. And you’d think the Deep South would be an option, but several states–Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia–are just too-black even for the Race War crowd, who could easily lose such a conflict. Plus, Georgia has become purple. Even Ohio and Indiana have a purple yoke; their old industrial areas still pull the lever for Democrats, or at least they will until gerrymandered into Michigan.  

 

Florida ticks all the lunatic boxes and then some, though even Neanderthals might be nervous about a state about to covered by the rising tides of the climate change they publicly deny but privately fear.    

 

After careless consideration, there are a few places liberals could hand over with minimal regret. South Carolina has a lot of African Americans who’d be wise to boogie elsewhere because few places have as many angry white folks as the Tinfoil Hat–sorry Palmetto–State. This makes it prime turf for fleeing Floridians (sans its Cubans­ when Miami becomes an underwater archaeology site). Think of the pride fat golfers will feel as they make their way to Hilton Head through a wildlife refuge named for enslavers (the Pinckney family). Doesn’t it make your patriotic breast swell?

 

Wyoming could be a refuge for modern-day Marlboro Men. We know what Wyoming thinks about gays, so there’s no issue there. It is isolated, though, and neighboring Montana has been known to elect a few liberals, so maybe a division is in order. Stock the prime huntin’ grounds with weak-eyed buffalo, hobbled deer, and unwanted domestic pets.  

 

West Virginia is prime redneck territory, though newcomers would have to compete with indigenous hillbillies. It’s 93% white, loves Bible-belting snake-handling preachers, and the house trailers there–you wouldn’t believe how cheap! A lot of those abandoned stills and mineshafts are already cooking meth, so there’s lots of opportunity in the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Or perhaps ta contiguous solution is needed. One would be the creation of Arkiana, a Gulf Coast combo of Arkansas and Louisiana. Ark would need to find some good old boys to do the chicken gumping now done by Asians, but at least them jobs ain’t goin’ to furriners. The debauchery tourist trade would take a hit with New Orleans off the board, but that’s temporary as the Crescent City is likely to disappear come the next Big One hurricane. Thankfully Ark will supply survivors with loads of Walmart blankies. Did I mention the gator and snake huntin’?

 

Another prime knot could be those Heartlands that make Republicans teary-eyed. You know, the ones with unbalanced politically power, though just 1.4% of Americans actually make their living in agriculture. A conglomerate of Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Missouri would give the Self-Righteous plenty of room to roam and procreate in abortion-free delight. I’ve no idea how Iowans drifted, but they have become as nutty as Kansans and Nebraskans. Hard to believe all three were once socialist hotbeds. Missouri would give this mini-CSA an exclusive entertainment mecca: Branson, aka/where entertainers decades past their sell-by dates live out their days. When the Civil War began, President Lincoln proclaimed, “I must have Kentucky” and secured it for the Union. Abe was wrong. A Union Kentucky took like a program of Algebra for Plow Horses. It’s pretty, it has horseracing, but the political record….  

 

If we toss in West Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida, we’d cede 20% of America. Texas might go its own way. Good luck with that because the West Coast and Northeast have most of the nation’s fresh water and are known to be hard bargainers. Alaska is also pretty red, and it’s really out of the way, but if it wants to go Nouveau CSA, fine. Get out the flag and start cutting away some stars. A peaceful partition might be only way to avoid another Civil War.

 

 

Lynne Hanson April 2022 Artist of the Month

LYNNE HANSON

Ice Cream in November

 

 

 

Okay, just let me say how much I adore Lynne Hanson. She has been called “Canada’s Queen of Americana,” though her self-assessment is that she’s “too tough for folk and too blues-influenced for country.” Hanson is as likely to wail on her Gretsch as warble to her acoustic. Small wonder she’s an independent artist, though I’m pretty sure that’s as much her choice as that of the music industry.

 

Hanson has just dropped–as in today–her 9^th solo album, the wonderfully named Ice Cream in November and, no, it’s not a sweet metaphor or a flight into nostalgia. To make certain she didn’t fall into the trap of repeating herself, Hanson worked with Blair Michael Hogan, who cowrote nine of the album’s dozen songs, joined her as a sideman, and helped her veer in different directions. The title track is sonically adventurous and requires a singer with Hanson’s power and timing to carry the song and keep us in a melancholic mood. She sings that she’s as lonely as ice cream in November because too many look away and cast their gaze at, Beauty queens/That no one remembers/Dancing across the screen/A plastic dream machine/Screaming look at me. In her own subtle way, Hanson puts the hurt on the shallow attachments of a squeaky wheel culture.

 

Hanson tries on lots of hats on this record. The surf guitar treatment on “Shadowland” makes it deliciously retro in that too-bluesy-for-country way she noted. And she sure wasn’t aiming for Nashville-style wholesomeness with lyrics such as, My daddy was a preacher/I didn’t know him all that well/One hand on the Bible/Both feet bound for hell/Truth, lie, no surprise/You can’t unring that bell/Tell me all your dirty secrets/I promise I won’t tell. It’s also one of several times she turns back the clock ever so slightly. Listen to “100 Mile Wind,” in which she mixes dollops of Western music, outlaw balladry, and a giddyup structure to blend past imagery (Bonnie and Clyde) with the dust and drugs of modern-day Oklahoma. (Yeah, another person who understands the U.S. better than its native-born.)

 

If you’re looking for Hanson’s Canadian roots, she has two that take her observations back home. “Le Bon Moment” is sung in French and is another song that implores us not to look away. At one point she evokes Romeo and Juliette, reminds us it’s a tragedy, and in the next breath pleads, me n’oublie pas (don’t forget me). If I had to pick my favorite song on Ice Cream in November, though, it would be “Hip Like Cohen,” which is simultaneously is hip, but is also laced with tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor. Musically it hops, bops, and features smart (and smart ass) writing like, Sipping sidecars while posing/Lining up to be seen/Proud to be postmodern/Without really knowing what that means. It’s simply an infectious song that’s cool when she sings it with a band or sits on a stool and belts it out unplugged.

 

Every track on this album sparkles and Hanson certainly succeeded in breaking her own mold, even though I’ve never found anything particularly repetitive about her music. Like Mary Chapin Carpenter, her deeper tones resonate perfectly with her mature outlook on life, intuitive sense of how to shape a song, and the wisdom to know when to ramp up the power and when to let herself drift with well-considered melodies and solid beats. This is a polished, gutsy, and substantive release.

 

Rob Weir

 

Discover Milton Avery at the Wadsworth

 

 

MILTON AVERY

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Hartford, Connecticut

Through June 5, 2022.

[Click on works for larger viewing size]

 

The acknowledged greats of art generally deserve their exalted reputations. Yet, most people who like art have a fondness for someone who is ranked a notch or two below on the esteem scale. Milton Avery has long been on my list of underappreciated painters. The Wadsworth show in Hartford organized by London’s Royal Academy of Arts might put him on your list as well. Funny that London took the lead on this show, given that Avery (1885-1965) was on the New York/Connecticut shuttle for most of his life and the Wadsworth owns several of his best works.

 

Avery was an important American Modernist who is sometimes called the “American Matisse.” Like Matisse, Avery took to a Modernist style that emphasized color, line, shape, and form over symbolism, allegory, and representationalism. That is, that’s where he ended up. Like a lot of painters, he began more conventionally. As we see at the Wadsworth, his earliest works dabbled in landscape. T’is a wise person who pivots when realizing the mundanity of such works. 

 

Avery vs. Hartley

 

 

 

 

His father was an artist and Avery married one himself, Sally Michel, with whom he raised a daughter named March. Avery wasn’t very good at portraiture either, unless it was caricature, such as his deprecatory self-portrait. (He actually did have protruding ears, though!) Note the hints of work from his friend Marsden Hartley in his self-portrait. Avery’s blockier style was an offshoot of cubism, as were many Hartley’s. Avery’s self-portrait even hints of Hartley’s homoeroticism, though he wasn’t gay and Hartley was. (I often wonder why few critics have picked up on David Hockney’s debt to Hartley and Avery.)    

 

 

His daughter March was one of Avery’s favorite models. He painted her with a Picasso-like mask when she was young and in different moods and settings throughout her life. She got a long neck, not her father’s ears! 

 

 

 

Avery was often playful. Blue trees to represent a New England autumn? An aerial view of beachside homes that look like pianos crossed with staples a spit of land? Why not? Who doesn’t need an abstracted lizard to grace a still life of flowers? 

 

 

 

One of the things I really like about Avery is that he’s one of those people who reminds you of a lot of other painters yet once he hit his stride, he managed to be entirely himself. He befriended Mark Rothko and even did a few three-color panel canvases like Rothko when they painted together. Can you paint just three color blocks and make it look different? He managed.

 

 

 

He also flitted through a phase in which he painted with acidic colors reminiscent of the German expressionist Ernst Kirchner mixed with a splash of Lucian Freud. But other projects hint of fauvism and surrealism, which he admired, or the troubled thoughts of Edvard Munch. (By most accounts, Avery was not a tormented soul.) He went to Coney Island and captured its surrealistic energy in ways analogous to Reginald Marsh, but with a different take.

 

 

Avery (top) vs. Marsh

 

 

 

Ultimately, though, Avery’s greatest success came via addition by subtraction evocative of Matisse. By this I mean he began to simplify. He painted in ways that told a story in as few lines and shapes as possible without journeying into chaotic distortion. Check out this beach scene that reduces sunbathers to pyramid-like rocks. Those red slashes in the water are a swimmer knifing through the water. 

 

 

 

Much of Avery’s work is calming because he gives just enough information to invite you to fill in details without giving away what he intended or telling the viewer what to think.  And often it’s not supposed to be anything other than people wiling away the time. He didn’t even need to bother with any sort of Art 101 perspective. Who knows? Maybe he wasn’t much better with perspective than he was at landscapes or portraits, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Matisse also dispensed with illusional 3-D perspective. Who says you need it to convey emotion or infer anything other than what’s on the canvas? 

 

 

 

Milton Avery–an American original. Even when he reminds you of others.

 

Rob Weir

A Slow Fire Burning: Hawkins Scores Again

 

A SLOW FIRE BURNING (2021)

By Paula Hawkins

Riverhead Books, 307 pages.

★★★★ ½ 

 

 

 

Several bodies, a passel of damaged people, houseboats on a canal, and a gifted writer spinning a yarn. What could better? Not much. There’s a reason why so many novices want their works to be compared to those of Paula Hawkins. A Slow Fire Burning takes us to South London. Most visitors seldom stray beyond its usual tourist sites such as the London Eye, the Tate Modern, and Tower Bridge as much of the rest is residential and some are among the most crime-ridden of London’s fringes.

 

The one described by Hawkins surely is. The story pivots around several people who either live on canal boats or spend a lot of time there and in nearby neighborhoods.  It is loaded with people associated Daniel Sutherland, a murder victim. Is it a coincidence that Daniel’s mother died just a few weeks before him?  Are several other deaths from less than natural causes?

 

Miriam Lewis finds Daniel’s body and swings into action of trying to sleuth out his killer. She is not, however, any sort of Sherlock Holmes. Miriam was traumatized in her teens when she and a friend did something fatally stupid. Miriam is now an overweight busybody who is so friendless that she has few social interactions other than occasional customer who enters the adjacent floating bookstore where she works part-time. That’s fine by her, as she’s even more fixated on a book she wrote titled The One Who Got Away. Based on a tip, Miriam thinks that Theo Myerson stole her ideas. Insofar as detectives are concerned, there’s a lot about Miriam that makes her a suspect.

 

Theo certainly has demons to battle. He is a divorcee whose son Ben died before he was four. He blames Ben’s Aunt Angela, Daniel’s mother, for his son’s death. One witness recalls that Theo made Angela cry, which was the second-to-last time she was seen. Maybe Theo killed both of them. Then again, Theo’s ex-wife Carla is also wiggy, might have been sleeping with Daniel, and has her own theories about why Ben died.

 

Other dodgy people float through the plot. There is Laura, who Miriam thinks had sex with Daniel. Laura is unstable, hears voices, despises her mother-in-law, and has a limp courtesy of being hit while cycling by the man who became her deceased mother’s second husband. She’s such a psychological mess that her mantra is “it’s not my fault” to all situations, even when it is indeed her bad. Plus, she found Angela’s body and has Daniel’s watch. This makes her a person of interest, though she insists Miriam offed Daniel. Is it happenstance that Laura helps 80-year-old Irene, a widow who also happens to have been Angela’s friend?

 

If murder is, as so often reported, the product of damaged minds, who do you want to finger? Things become even messier when there are confessions that the police doubt and arrests that don’t stick. Hawkins thickens her plot even more via the use of a book-within-a-book technique and you can probably guess the identity of the other book. The mystery centers on clues from that book, plus a missing dog, the dog’s leash, a door key, a St. Christopher medal, a man in a wheelchair, and the assumption that all old people are just in a holding pattern waiting to die and know nothing about technology. There are also attempts at framing both innocent and guilty people, plus numerous other incorrect assumptions and one that turns out to be true with a twist added.

 

As you can infer from the above complex web, A Slow Fire Burning is an intricate story that places attention demands upon the reader. There is no Mis Marple or Hercule Poirot to explain the clues; you need to do the mental work yourself. It’s that rare work that’s a page-turning murder mystery that is more than just mindless escape. If anything, the book might be more complicated than it needed to be, but kudos to Hawkins for not resorting to any sort of happy ever after ending. Even after murders are resolved there are still folks in serious need of therapy. Just like real life.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Dig: A (mostly) True Story

 

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 6^th 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