The Dig is in the running for the most British film ever made. An ungenerous person would say it’s a movie where people stare at dirt for 2 hours. However, the quiet dignity and earnest devotion in the filmmaking, acting, and storytelling slowly kind of just win you over. The Dig is perfect for that Sunday Evening date for a married couple that likes something sweet and mannered before they have some tea and go to bed. And sometimes that’s all a movie needs to be init?
It’s 1939 in Suffolk England, a country on the verge of another world war. But it’s also a place where a freelance archaeologist named Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) can bike his way across the county to Edith Pretty’s (Carey Mulligan) Sutton Hoo estate. Edith has these mounds on her property that she thinks house famous artifacts from England’s past. With the lingering upcoming war against her, Edith urges Basil to dig in hopes that she can contribute something to Britain’s history before time runs out.
Commitment goes a long way into making The Dig an enjoyable experience. Everyone does their part to the best of their ability, elevating the slight story. Moira Buffini’s screenplay does a great job inserting as much urgency as possible into a story about an archaeological dig. In addition to the global time crunch of WWII, Buffini’s story transfers that urgency to the characters’ lives as well, giving each of them added motivation to see this excavation through. Director Simon Stone makes Suffolk look like the greatest place on Earth, filled with majestic sunrises and sunsets; each new weather pattern controlling the feelings of the populous. The actors pitch in too, giving the screenplay the good college try. I haven’t been the biggest Carey Mulligan fan, but she conveys dignified determination perfectly fine here, and Ralph Fiennes gives Basil that charming lack of perspective a townie with love for his history might possess. Other than the occasional manners-driven villain, The Dig positions time as the biggest obstacle and revolves everything around that premise, making it incredibly easy to have audiences connect to the low stakes dig they’re watching and pretty much root for everyone here to rise to the occasion and donate their findings to a historical museum. Sure.
Clearly the creatives behind the movie want The Dig to be taken seriously. But because of that, there’s zero effort to inject a little more humor into the story, to the movie’s detriment. There’s more than a few times Basil barges in on Mrs. Pretty with “urgent” news that’s incredibly pointless, and she takes the dignified route out of the situation, when that would have been a perfect time to lay into Basil just a bit with some necessary perspective on the situation. The Lily James subplot sets up some chances at awkward humor and balks away in favor of some sappy melodrama instead, because what the audience needed was more low stakes pressure on its characters. Even characters perfectly set up to be manners driven jerks like Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) are given more dignity than they deserve. A little humor would have gone a long way to making the movie a more fun experience and maybe would have helped hammer home the big emotion The Dig wants to achieve.
But the movie is more interested in putting in the work, but then having a cup of tea, and moving on. In some ways its a delight to not have an obsession with prestige or profitability, and just sit back and watch a delightful tale. I know The Dig will work for you if you’re in for a lazy chill binge because the minute my Anglophile parents found the movie, they built a weekend evening around it, and then went right to bed. There’s the tag line. “The Dig: Ease yourself into a long weekend snooze.”