The Dig

The Netflix original film The Dig (2021) is so fascinating that it drives viewers to additional research on its topic, the 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo treasure in Suffolk.  This, itself, is a signal achievement because the Sutton Hoo artifacts and their historical context are remarkably important, indeed, one of the greatest discoveries in 20th century archaeology.  Simon Stone's film about the discovery of the treasure is exceptionally lyrical and moving.  Despite its manifold inaccuracies, the movie is well worth watching and, indeed, very rich in interesting ideas.  

In The Dig, a middle-aged woman who owns a manor near the sea retains a self-taught "excavator" (he declines the term "archaologist") to dig in several burial mounds on her property.  The excavator, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), has been working at a Roman Villa site for the local Ipswich Village Museum.  Brown, a proud, if unassuming man, rejects the offer made by Edith Pretty, the property owner played by Carey Mulligan, that he work for her in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery on her land -- her offer for wages is too low.  (Pretty says that she bought the land with her husband so that they could dig in the mounds.  However, her husband has unexpectedly died, leaving her a widow with a nine-year old son.)  When Mrs. Pretty increases her offer, Brown agrees to work for her and takes up lodging in an apartment with her servants.  Mrs. Pretty has an intuition that there is something important lurking in the big conical mound rising above a number of smaller earthen embankments on her property.  At first, Brown resists the idea, asserting that soil on the mound is compacted due to earlier looting in which "flutes" (that is, vertical shafts) were dug into the earth.  Some ship rivets are found in an adjacent mound and, then, Brown determines that the center of the big earthwork remains intact -- the looters were mislead by a thousand years of plowing that has eaten away the mound and concealed its true shape.  When he digs in what he now believes was once the center of the mound, he finds the soil undisturbed and unearths the form of a ship buried in the ground.  (The ship's timbers are gone but the outline of the ship's wooden structure is indelibly imprinted in the soil.)  Archaeologists at the British Museum are summoned to the site and a power struggle ensues between the auto-didact Basil Brown and pompous scientist from London, Charles Phillips.  The Museum has sent a crew of young archaeologists to assist Phillips including a married couple Peggy and John Piggott.  The Piggott's are unhappy; John is apparently gay and, probably, carrying out an affair with another archaeologist on site.  Mrs. Pretty's nephew is also present to take pictures of the proceedings.  In the course of the dig, fantastically beautiful treasures are discovered that are ultimately donated to the British Museum.  (I recall seeing them in that place when I was in London many years ago -- the artifacts are wonderful and perfectly preserved and include the famous warrior's helmet that has graced the cover of a hundred editions of Beowulf.)  The British Museum scholars believe that the site represents a Viking ship burial but Brown is convinced that the artifacts are Anglo-Saxon.  Of course, his theory turns out to be correct and the intricate jewelry retrieved from Sutton Hoo is now famous as exemplars of the highest achievements of the so-called "Insular style" itself a hybrid of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon art.  The dig takes place under the looming threat of World War Two and ends when the Germans invade Poland.  The treasures are taken from the site and hidden somewhere in the London Underground.  When they are first displayed in 1948, Edith Pretty is dead and Basil Brown isn't given due recognition for his role in unearthing these treasures.  The film's final shot is an extended image of Brown and a helper burying the imprint of the funeral ship after covering it in a swath of "hessians" -- that is pine branches.  

Anglo-Saxon ornamental metalwork of this era is wonderfully intricate with convoluted intertwined figures of beasts in filigree set against fine cloisonne work.  The Dig is similarly intricate and, although it's central narrative is simple enough, the film's themes are cunningly inlaid and, then, worked out in fascinating detail.  There is, in fact, almost too much thematic material contained within the movie.  It has a disconcerting density of thought and idea worked into its events.  The coming war casts a weird twilight gloom over the plot and one scene, taking place in a blacked-out pub (they are practicing for the war) is literally very dark.  There is a nearby RAF base and old planes salvaged from World War One are continually flying over the site of the dig.  In one scene, a plane crashes in the nearby estuary and, when Mrs. Pretty's nephew, Rorie Lomax, heroically dives into the water, we see the dead pilot like an old knight, seemingly armored in vest and mask, half hidden by great floral wreathes of bubbles rising from the wreck -- it's a strangely archaic image linking past to present.  Basil Brown is denigrated by the people at the British Museum and treated disrespectfully -- this is evidence of "snobbery" as Mrs. Pretty says and class prejudice.  However, her staff won't allow Brown to enter the manor at the front door and he has to come through the door to the servant's quarters at the rear of the house.  Basil Brown becomes a substitute father for the half-orphaned Robert, Mrs. Pretty's son, and several scenes feature the relationship between the boy and old man.  Brown is also an amateur astronomer and he spends much time showing the boy the wonders of the heavens through his telescope.  Peggy Piggott embarks on a love affair with Mr. Lomax, Mrs. Pretty's handsome nephew.  This is her consolation for her husband's homosexuality -- depicted in the film as an open-minded attempt to free her priggish husband so that he can express his true nature.  (This is the least successful aspect of the movie and seems to me to be somewhat mawkish.)  The specter of death hangs over the dig.  First, this is because it is a mortuary site, and, second, because of the looming carnage of the Second Word War.  Further, Mrs. Pretty is dying of some sort of protracted heart disease and becomes increasingly frail as the film progresses -- in some shots near the end she is filmed within the shape of the burial vessel, as if already half-interred.  By the end of the movie, The Dig has established a series of poetic equivalencies:  the Boat is a Queen buried in the earth, but also a vessel for the dying Mrs. Pretty.  To young Robert, who reads science fiction in Amazing Stories, the buried ship is a rocket aimed into the sky, that is, the symbol for further exploration of the universe.  The film is full of understated, if poetic, dialogue and, ultimately, stands for the proposition that we don't dig into the graves of ancient people because they are dead but because, indeed, they are very much alive and have their existence in continuities with us.  

The Dig is beautifully shot and designed.  Many of the landscapes of the flat littoral look like J.M.W. Turner, hazy and impressionistic, and the camera is often pointed up into the humid sky.  The people coming to the dig in the early morning are shot through hazy, ominous mist and they look like soldiers of the Great War trudging to their destinies.  When a trench collapses on Brown, he has to be dug out of the earth and, sheathed in clay, he looks like the corpse of one of the ancient warriors buried in the earth.  The film pauses for poetic dialogue, particularly, a sequence in which a then-famous event is discussed:  while performing on the cello in park, a musician was accompanied by a nightingale.  The nightingale seemed to sing as a duet with the woman's stringed instrument.  Later, all the nightingale's in the neighborhood seemed to have changed their song to echo the music played in the park.  When we first see the buried ship's imprint in the sand, there is a wonderful cut away to Brown sitting on the side of a great tidal estuary watching as an eerie-looking vessel, a kind of unearthly barge, sweeps by on the water.  Chamberlain apologizes for failing to prevent a war.  Someone says the war will be fought in the air and the camera points upward to show us a sky full of wet, floppy-looking clouds,  There's a partial eclipse of the moon.  A woman wears a coin imprinted with Augustus Caesar on her breast.

This is a wonderful movie.  It's very carefully worked-out.  The love affair between the RAF recruit (Mrs. Pretty's nephew) and the Peggy Piggott is carefully foreshadowed.  A sort of pre-war epidemic of love affairs is underway -- people seem to be having sex as a bulwark against the coming catastrophe.  If anything, the film is too tidy in the way that it resolves conflicts and too well-made.  It might be improved slightly if some of mysterious imponderability of the past beyond the abyss of time were allowed to infect some of the scenes.  The picture uses a number of jump cuts that seem slightly disconcerting in the bucolic context of the film and there is an odd technique of overlapping sound over images that don't correlate to what we hear that is a bit intrusive I thought. Everything in the film moves toward a climax at a so-called 'Treasure Inquest' -- we expect a big trial scene at the end but this isn't shown -- a clever narrative device, I though.  The film has some defects,  but, by and large, this movie is exquisite and the acting by the principals beyond any reproach. 

(You can read about the Sutton Hoo treasure on Wikipedia.  Of course, the actual events involving this excavation and its treasures are even more fascinating than the movie.  All of the main characters are historically based -- I think the film is very unfair to the Piggott's who were both estimable archaeologists in their own right.  Mrs. Pretty had her son Robert when she was 47.  She died of a stroke in 1942, not due to the slow onslaught of heart disease that make her increasingly frail as the film proceeds.  She was a spiritualist.  The treasure itself is much more complex than what is shown in the movie.  Furthermore, the film idealizes the ancient Anglo-Saxons -- the burial seems to date to the 7th century.  In fact, the site showed a number of peculiar executions or human sacrifices of very emaciated individuals.  However, the broad outlines of the excavation at the site are accurately portrayed in the film.)