"The Dig" is about how time leaves shards of history buried for centuries. At a deeper level it’s about how we sometimes bury our true self under a façade.
Author: Louise D'Arcens
(MENAFN - The Conversation) In 1939, a 7th century Saxon ship was uncovered at Sutton Hoo, the Suffolk property of Edith Pretty. The discovery of this ship would transform modern understandings of early medieval England, shedding light on the sophistication of its funerary practices, its accomplished artistry and craftsmanship, and its wide-ranging connections across Europe and beyond.
The new Netflix film The Dig dramatises the uncovering of the stunning find. Based on John Preston's 2007 historical novel and directed by Australian Simon Stone, the film follows Edith (Carey Mulligan) who, pursuing her intuition about some large mounds on her property, engages Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to excavate them.
J.P. Devine Movie Review: ‘The Dig’
Perfect cast uncovers haunting passage to the past, writes Devine.
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Director Simon Stone’s “The Dig” floats in and around Sutton Hoo in 1939, a patch of farmland near Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, surrounded by ancient woods, and scattered with people, each with their plots of earth and who spend their days tending to them.
The largest piece of land holds the rambling estate of Mrs. Edith Pretty, (Carey Mulligan “The Great Gatsby”) the widow of a British Army officer, and possessor of a ring of strange earthen mounds.
MOVIE INFO
Length: 112 minutes
If you were to make a list of childhood dream careers, archeologist would no doubt rank highly, alongside astronaut and star athlete. And it’s easy to see why: nothing is more thrilling than the promise of discovery, the idea that the next great buried treasure could be a shovelful of dirt away. It’s a sentiment that’s made films like the Indiana Jones series both iconic and irresistible. But there is also a sad beauty to archeology, which offers us a window into our past while reminding us of our fleeting mortality. We can’t help but wonder what future archeologists will find of us, what stories they will imagine based on the things that outlast our existence.
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It's late summer in England, 1939. The sight and sound of RAF planes flying overhead is an ominous reminder that war looms.
The prospect of conflict troubles sensitive Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a young widow who owns a chunk of rural Suffolk on which large mounds of earth rise up in a flat field as if the land is infested by a gang of gargantuan moles.
The grassy knolls were the reason she and her late husband bought the property, they wanted to explore them together.
"Well, best laid plans…" she says a little too breezily.
Sometimes you just don’t want a movie to end. The characters are so vivid and multidimensional, the milieu so inviting, the circumstances so compelling, you don’t want to let go. “The Dig,” starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes, is such a movie.
Suffolk, England, with the nation on the verge of war with Germany in 1939, may not sound comforting, but you would be surprised. Despite the prosaic title taken from the source novel by John Preston (based on the true story of the discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure), “The Dig” is a tale bathed in warm nostalgia and a romanticism steeped in British stoicism, one that allows room for not only the melancholy of classic melodrama, but also sharp wit and a genuine sense of wonder.
THE LITTLE THINGS: 3 STARS "The Little Things," a Los Angeles-set crime drama now available in select theatres and on PVOD, features a trio of Oscar winners in a dark story that shows the soft underbelly of the glamour capitol. Set in 1990, pre-DNA testing, this is a story of old-fashioned police work. Wits, stakeouts, payphones, and bleary eyes are their tools; obsession and black coffee fuel them. Oscar winner number one Denzel Washington is Joe Deacon, a deputy sheriff in small town California, whose job as a big city detective is long in the rearview mirror. When he joins strait-laced LAPD detective Sgt. Jim Baxter (Oscar winner number two, Rami Malek) on the hunt for a serial murderer, they focus on Albert Sparma (Oscar winner number three, Jared Leto) an off-kilter character they suspect is the killer. Turns out, their case reverberates with echoes from Deacon’s troubled past.
Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan rethink their safety protocols in The Dig
THE DIG (Simon Stone). 112 minutes. Available to stream Friday (January 29) on Netflix Canada. Rating:
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Not very much happens in The Dig, the new Netflix period drama about an archaeological excavation in Suffolk just before the start of the Second World War.
There is a dig, obviously, undertaken by Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) at the behest of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widowed mother convinced that the ancient mounds on her land are hiding something of historical value. And over the course of a summer, as Basil works the land, he and Edith come to understand each other very well.
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Netflix presents a film directed by Simon Stone and written by Moira Buffini, based on the novel by John Preston. Rated PG-13 (for brief sensuality and partial nudity). Running time: 112 minutes. Opens Friday at Landmark Century Centre and on Netflix. Based on a 2007 novel by John Preston that was inspired by the incredible true story of one of the most significant British archaeological finds ever, “The Dig” maintains a dignified and restrained approach, even when the material gets a little salacious in the form of not one but two “forbidden” romances. Melodramatic relationship developments aside, this is primarily about the well-off widow Edith Pretty (Mulligan) and the skilled but relatively unschooled excavator and amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), who in 1939 is hired by Edith to poke around the mounds of earth on the property of her house at Sutton Hoo. (Stories had been circulating for years about potential treasure buried beneath the land.)