Photo: Netflix
Imagine a faded photograph of a bouquet of flowers. Blushing rose has mellowed into apricot and radiant gold into the color of wheat, as what was once a tangible object with weight and scent is reduced to a scrap of paper brittled by time. Someday soon, that paper will also disintegrate, a melancholy idea that’s expressed rather poetically in director Simon Stone’s otherwise stuffy adaptation of
The Dig. The subjects of this period drama are buried treasure and repressed longing, ephemeral things that much like flowers or photographs crumble when they’re exposed to oxygen.
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Not an entirely smooth disinterment but satisfying all the same.
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1/15/2021
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes head the cast of Simon Stone s period drama about the excavation of an ancient burial site on an English estate as World War II looms, also featuring Lily James and Johnny Flynn.
Class as much as gender constraints obscured the achievements of 19th century English paleontologist Mary Anning, magnificently played by Kate Winslet in Francis Lee s slow-burn elemental love story
Ammonite. And class barriers continue to marginalize the work of Ralph Fiennes self-taught archeologist Basil Brown almost a century later in
The Dig. Simon Stone s account of the revolutionary 1939 discovery of a burial chamber that shed new light on the Dark Ages takes a somewhat awkward swerve midway from what s primarily a two-character piece into a larger ensemble drama, somewhat diffusing the emotional center. But the storytelling is laced with a gentle thread of melancholy that makes
Ralph Fiennes’s Sutton Hoo drama, The Dig, is a beautiful, heartfelt period tale
4/5
Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and a roguish Johnny Flynn bring this Thirties-set tale of intellectual and romantic passion to life
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes in Netflix s heartfelt drama, The Dig
Credit: Netflix
Dir: Simon Stone. Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, Lily James, Johnny Flynn, Ken Stott, Ben Chaplin, Monica Dolan. 12 cert, 112 mins
In the summer of 1939, as a million British soldiers prepared for war, a grave was found in a field at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Its occupant had been buried in the belly of an 89-foot ship that had been hauled up from the nearby river, sunk into the soil up to its rim, then covered over by an earthen mound.
Just before the outbreak of the World War II, a small-time archeologist was hired by a local woman to excavate her land. The thought was that it possibly contained some