The Dig (2021)

Poster Description: Edith Pretty (Mulligan) to the side on a field, lit by the sun peeking over hay bales. The Dig is in the centre with the tagline “Nothing stays lost forever.” Basil Brown (Fiennes) walks away towards the poster’s left side with his back to us.

As an Ipswich girl, I grew up visiting my local museum, and recall the time I visited Sutton Hoo on a school trip. It was a damp, cold day, and the terrain was far from wheelchair friendly. As a seven-year-old, I was not old enough to understand (or care) about how significant the site was. Since then, a recent BBC4 documentary informed me of the site’s discovery, with emphasis on Basil Brown. As a humble, working-class man from rural Suffolk, he had been forgotten or ignored until a few years ago. I was excited by the announcement that Netflix would adapt this piece of history into a film. There was, however, a small part of me that was wary. This was my county’s story and its biggest claim to fame.

Would The Dig do the event justice?

The Director: Simon Stone

The Cast:

Ralph Fiennes – Basil Brown

Carey Mulligan – Edith Pretty

Lily James – Peggy Piggott

Johnny Flynn – Rory Lomax

Ben Chaplin – Stuart Piggott

Ken Stott – Charles Phillips

Monica Dolan – May Brown

Archie Barnes – Robert Pretty

Bronwyn James – Ellen McKenzie

Certificate: 12A

Released on Netflix: 29^th January 2021

The Plot:

Before the Second World War, Edith Pretty (Mulligan, Suffragette) tasks Basil Brown (Fiennes, The White Crow) with excavating some mounds on her land. Brown might be an amateur archaeologist, but he has the passion and knowledge required to do the job well. However, the Ipswich Museum is keen to intervene – especially as an Anglo-Saxon burial ground is discovered.

The Review:

The Dig begins by panning across a large field, and…I was struck by the film’s quiet calm. With almost all of my family hailing from Suffolk, Fiennes’s gruff performance was oddly familiar and comforting. He was born in my hometown of Ipswich, which might have helped, and before filming, he engaged with local residents to grasp how Basil Brown would have spoken. The end result was just roigh’.

Picture Description: Basil Brown (Fiennes) stands in the trench of the buried Anglo-Saxon ship. He wears a brown hat, white shirt, and grey waistcoat and trousers. His head is dipped thoughtfully as he chews on his pipe.

The Dig is based on John Preston’s novel, making it easy for screenwriter Moira Buffini and director Simon Stone to do the necessary homework. As the film’s main antagonists, the archaeologists at Ipswich Museum worked at a street so named after the museum. As a fun fact, the building was a hide-out for suffragettes evading a consensus, a dance hall, and was a venue I frequently visited for meetings before the pandemic. Consequently, it was thrilling to see the building transformed for the film, but not enough to not recognise where they were!

While Carey Mulligan gives an outstanding, stoic performance as Edith Pretty (and looks like she was always meant to wear 1930s fashion), she is too young for the role. The real Edith was in her 50s when Sutton Hoo was discovered, and her relationship with Basil was friendly and professional. Nevertheless, in the film, there is an implication that Edith is jealous of Basil’s wife when May (the quietly brilliant Monica Dolan) comes to visit. The camera stays on Mulligan’s face a little too long as husband and wife talk outside her window, though nothing comes out of this scene. The real Edith also had a penchant for talking to the dead, which felt like a missed opportunity in the film to further depth Mulligan’s fragile performance. It would have given the lingering shot of the suitcase under Edith’s bed far more purpose and pathos, as it belonged to her late husband.

Picture Description: (Left) A portrait of the real Edith Pretty. In front of a brown background, her hair is dark in greying finger-waves around her solemn face. She wears blue silk and a long string of pearls. (Right) Carey Mulligan has short blonde hair with a lock almost covering one eye. She sits in a shack wearing a monochromatic shirt, looking determined.

Edith’s son, Robert, is played by Archie Barnes, who almost steals the film with boyish determination and warm chemistry with Fiennes and James. To avoid getting into spoilers, Robert is forced to deal with many difficult circumstances – the impending war for one thing – and Barnes succeeds with balancing a young boy’s desperation to appear tough while struggling to deal with it all. No doubt, we’ll see more of him in the future.

Though there is some hint of sentiment between Brown and Edith, the film concedes to shoehorning in a romance between Lily James’s Peggy Piggott and Johnny Flynn’s Rory Lomax. Peggy was a real assistant archaeologist during the excavation, whereas Lomax is entirely fictional. We meet Peggy with her older husband, Stuart (played by Ben Chaplin), and it is made clear that they are not meant for each other. Meanwhile, Lomax is a young and dashing photographer who signs up to fight. You can see where this is going a mile off.

Ken Stott (recognisable as Balin the dwarf in The Hobbit film trilogy) plays the curmudgeonly Charles Phillips, who works for the Ipswich Museum. He comes immediately at odds with Basil Brown, who had stepped away from working for the museum because his own way of doing things was more effective. Though his relationship with Phillips was not nearly as abrasive in reality, it perhaps explains why Brown was left out of Sutton Hoo’s history for so long.

The find of a lifetime.

Picture Description: The helmet is brown and mottled with rust with flaps that protect the head’s ears and back. A mask with a prominent nose, moustache, and mouth covers the face. The eye holes are black as if waiting to be used.

As I have mentioned, The Dig is a beautifully gentle film. Even when Brown is buried by soil during the excavation, it is very calm and very British. When the first fragment of treasure is found at the site, little to no fuss is made. The film relies on the characters’ beaming smiles and laughter to convey their discovery’s joy and triumph. With that said, I would have liked to have seen more about the other findings, the 263 buried objects, and perhaps some reference to the now iconic Anglo-Saxon helmet that resides in the British Museum. As it was later discovered in Basil Brown’s diary in 1939, Sutton Hoo was “…the find of a lifetime.”

Though it falls into the traps of creative license and annoying film tropes, The Dig successfully sheds light on a piece of Suffolk history. At the same time, it nudges an ordinary, brilliant man like Basil Brown to the forefront without making too much fuss. Before the pandemic, The Dig would have been lost in the noise of other, big-budget films, but this is an understated gem.

The Verdict: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

Sources:

Film poster - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3661210/?ref_=tt_mv_close

Sorting fact from fiction - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-history-behind-netflixs-dig-and-sutton-hoo-180976923/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3661210/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv

https://decider.com/2021/01/30/the-dig-netflix-true-story-sutton-hoo/

Basil Brown - https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/people/basil-brown-the-invisible-archaeologist-7001756

Ralph Fiennes was born in Ipswich: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000146/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Picture: Basil Brown (Fiennes) in the site – https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/01/29/ralph-fiennes-buried-alive-for-netflix-the-dig/4289222001/

Picture: Edith Pretty (Mulligan) – https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/the-dig/

Picture: The iconic Sutton Hoo helmet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo_helmet