The Dig
Simon Stone (2021)
Simon Stone’s likeable second feature (following The Daughter) rather loses its way but not so as to obscure its strengths. Its defects aren’t of a kind that makes one like it less. Stone dramatises the discoveries made at Sutton Hoo in 1939, in conjunction with the relationship that develops between Edith Pretty, on whose land in Suffolk the dig took place, and Basil Brown, the local excavator she hired to investigate tumuli on the site. Moira Buffini’s screenplay is adapted from a 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, who has written fiction and non-fiction, and works on the boundary between them. He’s perhaps best known as the author of A Very English Scandal, a non-fiction book that became an acclaimed TV drama miniseries. The Dig, Preston’s only novelisation of factual material to date, is inspired by a family connection: his aunt, the eminent archaeologist Peggy Piggott, took part in the Sutton Hoo excavations at an early stage of her career. In Stone’s film, however, Peggy’s arrival on the scene signals the start of a weakening dramatic focus.
The main characters and themes are introduced clearly and economically. Edith (Carey Mulligan), a wealthy widow with a young son, Robert (Archie Barnes), invites Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to look over the burial mounds on her land. Brown has recently been paid a pittance by the Ipswich Museum to do excavation work for them; Edith initially offers him the same rate of pay and he turns her down. He’s cycling home to the village where he lives, some miles away, when Edith’s big car draws alongside. Her chauffeur winds down the window and hands him an improved offer. Brown accepts it and comes to lodge on the estate. Soon after he’s started work there, Edith, who suffers from bouts of breathlessness, goes to London for medical tests. These reveal terminal heart disease, the legacy of a serious childhood illness. She remains interested in Brown’s progress as he, with a couple of helpers from the estate, proceeds with the dig but her fears of mortality make their presence felt. A trench collapses on Brown, who is buried alive before being rescued and quickly reviving. Edith asks him what he experienced in the darkness.
James Reid Moir (Paul Ready), head of Ipswich Museum, tries and fails to lure Brown back from Sutton Hoo to work on a Roman villa. When the dig on Edith’s land starts to attract wider national interest, a bigger cheese, the Cambridge archaeologist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), descends on the place. Pooh-poohing Brown’s suggestion that the tumuli may be of Anglo-Saxon rather than Viking origin, Phillips takes over the excavations by order of the Office of Works, though Edith successfully insists that Brown continue to be involved. Unlike the archaeology establishment, Basil Brown (1888-1977) wasn’t a formally educated man, leaving school at the age of twelve to work on his father’s small farm. Yet Brown was widely self-educated: he learned languages, obtained various night school diplomas and knew plenty about archaeology – as well as the local landscape like the back of his hand. His avid interest in astronomy particularly appeals to Robert Pretty, who hits it off with Basil from the start. The fatherless boy becomes attached to the middle-aged, childless man.
Edith’s estate is close to an airbase; the planes that pass regularly overhead are an obvious indicator of the imminence of World War II. More subtly, the film’s cinematographer Mike Eley not only does justice to the distinctive Suffolk landscape but also suggests the fragility of the tranquil scene: the lighting has a nostalgic quality. The undisturbed boat grave at Sutton Hoo, with its wealth of Anglo-Saxon artefacts, is an all-time famous archaeological discovery. It may well have been the subject of documentaries before today but The Dig does well to record the key events within a mainstream drama. What’s most impressive about the narrative, though, is how coherently it blends these events, through the people chiefly involved, with larger ideas. The juxtaposition of Brown’s excavations and Edith’s terminal illness enables Simon Stone to contrast the brevity of a single human life with the longevity of civilisation, the excitement of bringing buried treasure out of the earth with Edith’s terror of interment and decay beneath it. Her fears of personal oblivion are also placed in the context of an impending war, with all the deaths that will bring.
Edith’s liking for Basil grows. She invites him for dinner, he accepts but has to cry off when his wife May (Monica Dolan) turns up to check that all is well: her daily letters to her husband, preoccupied with the dig, have gone unanswered. Edith doesn’t renew the invitation. Once it’s clear an odd-couple romance between the leads isn’t on the cards, Stone works up romantic subplots for the supporting players – as if nervous the audience will switch off from a narrative shorn of love interest. Edith’s young cousin Rory Lomax (Johnny Flynn), a fictional character, comes to stay and takes photographs of the dig. Peggy Piggott (Lily James) and her husband Stuart (Ben Chaplin) join Phillips’s team along with an archaeologist called John Brailsford (Eamon Farren).
It’s made emphatically clear that the Piggotts’ sex life together is non-existent and that there’s a spark between Rory and Peggy – as there also is between Stuart and Brailsford. These relationships, whether invented or based on fact, feel like padding – something for the capable actors concerned to get their teeth into (though they scarcely can). While it’s true the Piggotts’ marriage didn’t last (even if they didn’t divorce until the mid-1950s), the resolution of their problems is pat. Peggy eventually tells her husband they should call it a day. She knows what kind of company he’s happier in. He and Brailsford go off together without further ado – as if it was as easy to do this in 1939 as it would be now. As these lesser figures get more screen time, the film suffers, too, from the consequent overshadowing of Brown.
Edith Pretty (1883-1942) was fifty-six at the time of the discoveries. At thirty-five, Carey Mulligan sounds way too young to play her but I’m glad she did. Mulligan’s youthfulness sharpens the change from the initially vital Edith to the oppressed invalid. Illness and fear sap her spirit and age her physically (the latter is underlined by Alice Babidge’s clever costuming). When Brown first calls on Edith, she leads him with alacrity towards the burial mounds. Once she’s ailing, that brisk manner acquires another meaning: it feels, in retrospect, as if Edith moved swiftly because she had no time to lose. Mulligan dramatises the woman’s unhappiness poignantly but without histrionics. She hints that guilty conscience about her anxious self-preoccupation bears on Edith’s decision to donate the trove to the British Museum (at the time, the largest gift ever made by a living donor). Her bequest to the nation is a double relief – an act of altruism that offers a consoling sliver of ‘immortality’.
According to Wikipedia, Nicole Kidman was the first choice for Edith. Although she’d have been close to the right age, the dynamic between the two main characters might not have worked as well with Kidman in the role. She’s a more competitive performer than Mulligan who, though always engaging, never threatens to eclipse Ralph Fiennes. That’s important: we see Basil Brown repeatedly slighted by museums and archaeology big shots; for decades after 1939, he remained the unjustly forgotten man of the Sutton Hoo discoveries. The last thing he needs is to be elbowed out of his own story. Fiennes was born and spent his infancy in Ipswich so perhaps it’s unsurprising that he makes Brown’s Suffolk accent his own. Even so, playing an essentially rustic figure was surely an imaginative challenge: Fiennes’ portrait of Brown is thoroughly felt, and shows not a trace of condescension. Having made the point that Brown should be the star of the show, I find I’ve little to say about Fiennes’s characterisation but I think that’s a compliment. It’s so naturally, beautifully complete.
Despite their excessive prominence, the subplots featuring Johnny Flynn, Lily James and Ben Chaplin are well played. The other supporting performances are a mixed bag. Looking more like a cartoon figure than ever, Ken Stott jarringly overdoes the overbearing, ridiculous Charles Phillips. (This may well be a travesty of the actual man.) Paul Ready is better, though his James Reid Moir is still a caricature of an ineffectual figure of authority. Archie Barnes moves beyond stage-school vitality in his early scenes to make credible and touching Robert’s growing awareness of his mother’s illness, and the boy’s vulnerability. It goes almost without saying that the outstanding work in a smaller role comes from Monica Dolan as May. Until she appears, virtually all we know about the Browns’ marriage is that they don’t have children, and that this is painful to Basil: when Edith asks if he’s a father, he replies, ‘No, we didn’t …’ and can’t finish the sentence. Once Dolan arrives on the screen, she and Ralph Fiennes – who clearly relishes his scenes with her – impart, with few lines, a miraculously vivid sense of a longstanding partnership. They express the intellectual gap and the bond between Basil and May.
The film’s closing stages are particularly shaky. Sutton Hoo makes the headlines all right: even on the eve of war with Germany (we hear Chamberlain’s broadcast), a predictably hyperactive press pack descends on rural Suffolk at news of buried treasure. Stefan Gregory’s score, an unsubtle irritant throughout, goes into overdrive. The wrapping up of each significant character’s story takes too long – this is one of those films that seem on the point of ending half a dozen times before they actually do. The Dig is regrettably stretched and shallowed; its serious themes would play out more incisively in a smaller, tighter drama. They still, register, though, and the performances that matter most are excellent. A film as unassertive as this, released exclusively in cinemas few years ago, would, like the unsung hero it sensitively celebrates, probably have been overlooked. Thanks to Netflix, The Dig avoids that fate – and valuably educates a big audience about Basil Brown.
30 January 2021