The Dig

Bravi to direc­tor Simon Stone, writer Moria Buffi­ni and their team for tak­ing on the unen­vi­able task of spin­ning a heart-puls­ing melo­dra­ma out of the dis­cov­ery of the arche­o­log­i­cal trea­sures of ​‘Sut­ton Hoo’ in the late 1930s. Wid­owed dowa­ger Edith Pret­ty (Carey Mul­li­gan) calls on the ser­vices of local exca­va­tor Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes, basi­cal­ly play­ing a ver­sion of Ted from Fast Show main­stay, Ted and Ralph) to take a look at a pair of mounds which she feels could be bulging with anti­quar­i­an good­ies. A very pursed Eng­lish dra­ma ensues.

Ini­tial­ly there are hints that this is to become a love sto­ry, and that the pair will devel­op a roman­tic bond amid the sop­ping mud and high seri­ous­ness of the endeav­our. But any notions of such sti­fled yearn­ing are nixed by about the half-way point when the sto­ry intro­duces a clutch of new char­ac­ters, which includes Lily James’ bushy-tailed stu­dent arche­ol­o­gist and John­ny Flynn’s cool-guy pho­tog­ra­ph­er-cum-fly­ing ace, and heads off in some strange and not-alto­geth­er sat­is­fy­ing directions.

In the scenes pri­or to the moment that shov­el has first con­nect­ed with mud, Stone is forced to dance on the spot a lit­tle by work­ing with lots of shots of peo­ple stand­ing in emp­ty fields, and try as he might, he can’t make them inter­est­ing. As breath­tak­ing as a windswept Suf­folk vista is on screen, too many of them can cer­tain­ly have you glanc­ing off to search out the near­est tea room. Yet hands are soon dirt­ied, and there’s even a left-field action set piece where Basil almost comes a‑cropper.

The scope of the find becomes clear by about a third of the way into the film, but then the script almost sweeps this once-in-a-gen­er­a­tion boun­ty aside in favour of explor­ing Edith’s life-threat­en­ing ill health, Basil’s hard-bit­ten hon­our code and lack of pro­fes­sion­al nous, and Edith’s pre-teen son’s (Archie Barnes) sen­ti­men­tal search for a father fig­ure, hav­ing lost his own in the war.

Add to that some rather unsat­is­fac­to­ry busi­ness involv­ing Ben Chap­lin as a clos­et­ed gay man who is string­ing along James (and the film is in no way empa­thet­ic towards his sex­u­al awak­en­ing), and a Mex­i­can stand-off between Basil, the British Muse­um and a local muse­um, and it maybe doesn’t end up amount­ing to much.

Per­haps the most dis­ap­point­ing aspect of the film is how lit­tle time it spends on actu­al­ly con­vinc­ing view­ers unfa­mil­iar with the impor­tance of Sut­ton Hoo that this was a fair­ly epochal moment in the annals of British ancient his­to­ry. When trea­sures are plucked on the ground, they’re flung in a pot or on a table, and the audi­ence are left to see them as ran­dom spoils rather than as a blue­print to the very fab­ric of our mod­ern society.

That said, Mul­li­gan brings a sul­try verve to Edith which lends the film a much-need­ed sense of windswept melan­choly, and there’s also the always-great Mon­i­ca Dolan who pops as Basil’s nervy wife. In just two short scenes, she flesh­es out this small char­ac­ter with a full and event­ful life, and her immac­u­late line-read­ings hint at what is an extreme­ly dys­func­tion­al rela­tion­ship that itself could be the bur­ial mound of its own undead demons. Would’ve been nice to have seen more of it, frankly.