The Dig

"If I had my way, take a boat from the river

And I'd bury the old man, I'd bury him at sea"

 

Sting - All This Time

 

 

Rounding out the past week's film interlude, let's talk about one I actually liked. Luckily Netflix, like HBO fifteen years before, is now desperately struggling to buy itself a smidge of respectability to smear over a decade's worth of excremental lowest-common-denominator. The Dig dramatizes the Sutton Hoo excavation (a.k.a. that p.12 picture in both your literature and your history textbooks) but thankfully to more restrained, dignified (let's call it what it is: British) extent than you'd ever get from a Hollywood production.

In fact, active restraint is its most charming feature. Every time you can smell a cliché coming, from a plucky young lad in danger to a last-second heroic rescue, to an unhappy marriage, to a workaholic's wife, to overbearing authority figures proving grudgingly accomodating after some hemming and hawing, to bad ideas needing to be justified by reason before being adopted, to the implacable march of history being merely adapted to and not overturned on heroic whims, to lines like "I could've cheered" (subtext: 'if I weren't so English') almost every single time you fear you're about to get fed an all-too-familiar dramatic set piece or strawman or catchphrase, the screenwriting and direction deliberately, pointedly stop short of cliché.

Well, almost. They were presumably forced by industry standards to include a gratuitous sex scene, and for that purpose inserted an invented Prince Charming into an otherwise reasonably accurate period piece. A gratuitous character for gratuitous sex. Even that glaring flaw was handled with wry self-consciousness.

And sure, it has other high points: solid acting across the spectrum, from Ralph Fiennes' recalcitrant competence even down to the little boy's dramatic scene, lovely cinematography and editing making the most of Southern England's otherwise infamously commonplace landscapes, a refusal to pervert the plucky underdog's snub by academia into some all-out class war while still repeatedly acknowledging it, etc. But still, The Dig stands out mainly for dedication to its core themes of cultural continuity and intellectual pursuit of same, for the galactic-scope vistas opened to anyone willing to stick their noses in the dirt.

Alright, so The Dig's not a grand world-shaking classic... but it's a beautiful piece of honest, dedicated, expert work, and all the more glaring its keen awareness of its own rarity as such.