Stephen and I found this film whilst searching for something a bit different to watch as a change from all the series of crime productions, usually involving the FBI or MI5 and featuring murder and gun-fights galore bolstered by umpteen car and helicopter crashes. These have served to keep us entertained during this last truly rotten year.
Once we had finished dinner the other night and settled into our comfy chairs, a couple of hours before our regular bedtime, Stephen was whizzing through the films that were on offer and I spotted, The Dig. It probably attracted me because I had very much enjoyed the programme on BBC Two: Stonehenge, The Lost Circle Revealed. Now I admit that I enjoyed that programme a lot more than Steve did, since he couldn’t get his head around the idea that a large team of people had spent ten years of their lives looking for the place where Stonehenge might have stood originally in North Wales and was moved with an unbelievable effort to Salisbury Plain. Ten years then, looking for a place with holes where The Stones were moved away from, to their present home. I loved that programme to pieces watching and every now and then feeling Steve’s eyes on me and when I glanced sideways, he would crack a smile as if to say, “What are you like woman, watching a documentary about these people wasting their lives? Once he even said, “I bet you wish you had been there with your little brush and child-size scraper don’t you”?
Well yes, I did. That has always been I pipe dream of mine; taking part in an important dig. I admit to my own geekdom; I would have loved it had I ever been given that joyous chance. As it is every time we pass along the road at Stonehenge I do say, “All Hail The Stones” and mean it.
Inviting viewers to watch this programme in an email that comes to my in box weekly the BEEB state this little tempter…..
The Welsh circle, believed to be the third biggest in Britain, has a diameter of 360ft (110m), the same as the ditch that encloses Stonehenge, and both are aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise. We watched that, one of us more rapt than the other, about 5 days ago.
So when I spotted The Dig, which is a new movie and also noted that Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan were the stars, and further, that it was a true story about the Sutton Hoo Excavation in Suffolk I got more and more keen. Carey Mulligan plays Edith Brown who was a wealthy landowner and employed Basil Brown played wonderfully by Ralph Fiennes. I got very interested in this for our entertainment that evening. Though I was a teeny bit worried that poor Steve was on another hiding according to his own TV tastes.
Once the story unfolded, it had another area of interest to me since the story begins in the last few months leading up to the start of WWII and continues on into September of that year. I was born on August 14th 1939 just three weeks before war was declared. I was feeling emotional quite early on in the film and was glad that we had not been in a cinema when I sobbed my heart out at the end. Actually, this time Stephen loved the movie every bit as much as I did and we haven’t yet knocked the discussion about it on the head yet either.
Strangely, to our ideas, the reviews were not as struck as we were by the story and the telling of it, whereas we thought it was the best movie we had seen this century.
The treasure that was uncovered was priceless and was donated to the British Museum.
Here is an extract from the Guardian writer Peter Bradshaw’s review:
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes unearth an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, but leave their emotions interred, in this robustly English drama.
The Dig is actually not a very earthy film, though there is intelligence and sensitivity and a good deal of English restraint and English charm, thoroughly embodied by the fine leading performers Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes. But the passions mostly stay buried, and the movie is disconcertingly structured in such a way that we are first asked to invest in these two intriguingly complex personalities, but then – just when their emotions might get disinterred – the focus shifts to a younger pair with more obvious romantic potential, played by Johnny Flynn and Lily James. Mulligan and Fiennes look like two characters who have been written out of their own soap opera. This doesn’t stop The Dig being engaging, and with a beautiful sense of landscape.
This sounds to me as though the reviewist
and ourselves had seen too completely different movies. Maybe he had indigestion
or maybe we are just a pair of old softies.
It is based on the true story of the sensational Sutton Hoo excavation in Suffolk on the eve
of the second world war; an Anglo-Saxon burial ship was found by the
self-taught working-class archaeologist Basil Brown, whose historic discovery
the academic establishment instantly tried to appropriate, without credit. He
had been hired by the local landowner and widow Edith Pretty, who had long
nursed an instinct that there was something in the “mounds” on her property.
The movie is vigorously adapted by screenwriter Moira Buffini from the 2007
novel by journalist and author John Preston – whose aunt Margaret Piggott was
involved in the dig.
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