‘Life is very fleeting. I’ve learned that. It has moments you should seize…’
You’ve all seen this movie before. Prestigious British cast. A period drama with clipped accents and stately homes. A heart-warming premise vaguely linked to one of the World Wars. And it’s all fine and wonderful, but in an age when the distrust of the upper classes has perhaps never been more pronounced, it’s kind of difficult to get excited about posh people finding vast riches buried underneath their rolling estates, even if they are played by Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes…
Edith Pretty (Mulligan), a character name so ridiculous that it just has to be based on a real person, strikes gold when an ancient ship is found to be buried beneath her back garden on the eve of WWII. She enlists the help of Basil Brown (Fiennes) in order to safely dig up the artefact whilst gently moaning in a provincial accent. Lily James is also there looking yearningly at Johnny Flynn because it’s a British period drama and they are the two actors that do that sort of thing at the moment, so they must, of course, appear on our screens every two weeks or so. It’s all incredibly British. Or what American people think Britain is like, at least.
So yeah, the cast are all good obviously. Fiennes works hard to bring Basil Brown to life and Mulligan is as competent as ever (although after seeing how explosive she was in Promising Young Woman her performance here feels ridiculously tame). The supporting cast are all very middle class and British. It’s all very polite. And to be fair, it is a genuinely interesting story. But it’s all just a little… empty. I found it hard to root for or care about any of the characters here, despite a subplot featuring a terminally ill parent and their grieving child. Perhaps I’m still smarting from the similarly themed A Monster Calls, or perhaps I’m just dead inside, but The Dig did very little for me on an emotional level.
If director Simon Stone is looking for a pull quote for the film’s poster then I’m happy to oblige him:
The Dig – ‘It’s fine’.