A lot happens, with curiously little effect. The arrival of a museum muckety-muck ( The Hobbit’s Ken Stott) and two married archeologists (Ben Chaplin and Lily James), along with Edith’s handsome photographer cousin ( Stardust’s Johnny Flynn), complicate things further.
Supporting characters drift in and out of the picture, from Edith’s young son to Brown’s neglected yet supportive wife. Incidents pile up on one another like sedimentary rock layers - there is a cave-in, a plane crash, someone has a bad ticker (damn rheumatic fever aftereffects!), furtive glances exchanged between numerous parties, an illicit romance or two. It’d feel like something extracted from a boutique studio’s vault sealed in the 1990s even if the star of The English Patient wasn’t involved. The only specters here are the Ghosts of Miramax Prestige-Projects Past.Īnd The Dig really does feel like a movie out of its time, as if the past 20 years of filmmaking hadn’t really happened, it was still normal for movie stars to mope around in class-conscious 20th-century finery instead of capes, and shows like Downton Abbey hadn’t come round to fill the Brit period-melodrama gap. It will eventually be known as the Sutton Hoo Treasure, and were this not lifted from the real-life discovery of a major historical find, you’d have hoped that this dig might also unleash a few disturbed spirits, ready to turn Edith’s estate into a gothic haunted house.
As various posh accents bump up against working-class ones, they eventually do discover quite a trove of corroded, centuries-old flotsam and jetsam, which attracts the attention of no less then the British museum. The gentleman is not an archaeologist, as he’s quick to point out - he’s merely an amateur “excavator” with a deep knowledge of history, a shyness and modesty in his manner, and a seemingly endless supply of dirt-specked tweed suit jackets.Įdith feels that the land on her estate may be home to a Viking burial ground Basil thinks there’s something even older lurking under there. Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widow of some taste and renown, has hired a local named Basil Brown ( Ralph Fiennes) to help her locate any potential findings. Behind a large manor in Suffolk, there are a number of jutting, earthen mounds that suggest the possibility of ancient artifacts buried beneath the soil. Britain stands on the verge of war, as the RAF planes constantly buzzing past can attest. The year is 1939, the countryside is English, the upper lips are most definitely stiff.
A quick methadone hit for anyone still experiencing Merchant-Ivory withdrawal symptoms, The Dig (streaming on Netflix starting January 29th) is a throwback to a bygone era in more ways than one.
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