A
film review by Mick LaSalle for SFChronicle.com on Jan 25, 2021.
Along the way, it deals with Britain on the eve of war — it takes place in 1939, in the months leading up to the German invasion of Poland — and about the effort to recover artifacts of a lost civilization, just as modern civilization was hanging in the balance.
Based on the novel by John Preston, and beautifully adapted by Moira Buffini, The Dig seems to expand as it goes along. There’s confidence behind this film, a confidence that allows it to do things that usually are not done: It introduces major characters halfway through, and it sometimes diverges from the main story to concentrate on the feelings of supporting characters.
Yet all of it works. All of it holds together, guided by the sure hand of director Simon Stone, who subtly imparts his sense of the story. His idea is that everyone involved mattered, and so we come away with an impression of an entire moment of time.
At the center of the movie are Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown. Pretty is a widow, with a large tract of land she believes holds archaeological riches, and Brown is a self-educated excavator, a sort of amateur archaeologist of genius, who became an expert in recognizing the provenance of diverse ancient objects.
The main discovery at Sutton Hoo was a 90-foot ship, which had been used as a burial chamber. There were coins, which proved that the Anglo-Saxon culture had currency, and pieces dating back to A.D. 600 — about 200 years earlier than scholars had expected.
As is often the case in British period films, class becomes an element in The Dig. As played by Fiennes, Brown is a working-class eccentric, utterly brilliant, but uneducated and unpolished. He’s an odd teammate for Mulligan’s Mrs. Pretty, who is of the landed gentry. Later, as the discoveries multiply, more people get involved, including snobbish museum directors, who try to keep Basil Brown’s participation at the margin.
For a while, that seems to be all that The Dig is going to be about — the effort to rob Brown of credit for his discovery. Instead, the story gets bigger. A team of scholars arrives, including the husband-and-wife archaeologists Stuart (Ben Chaplin) and Peggy Piggott (Lily James).
In the interest of entertainment, the movie has fun with the Piggotts. Here, Stuart is almost 20 years older than his young wife, who is languishing for lack of romantic attention. At one point, having just come out of the bath, she opens up her robe to him and he acts like he wants to dive under the bed. In real life, Stuart and Peggy were both in their late 20s.
Mulligan is much younger than the real-life Edith Pretty, though Mulligan plays Edith as of indeterminate age. Much of her performance is iceberg-like; she lets you see just enough to know there is more there. But every so often, she lets down her guard to smile, and we’re reminded that Mulligan has one of the best smiles in the movies — a smile of complicity, like she has officially let you in on a secret.
One last thing worth noting is the performance of child actor Archie Barnes, who plays Edith’s 9-year-old son, Robert, and really does seem like a child from an unguarded, earlier time. Robert is a little guy who’s very stimulated by the dig, still grieving over the loss of his father, and in mortal panic at any sign of ill health in his mother. It’s lovely to encounter a big-scale performance from a child that is in no way annoying. [LaSalle’s rating: 3 stars out of 4 = 75%]
Labels: biography, drama, history, Netflix, period
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=73, viewers=55)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=73, viewers=83)
Netflix
LaSalle review
Wikipedia film
Wikipedia Sutton Hoo
Wikipedia Edith Pretty
No comments:
Post a Comment