The Dig Unearths Some Treasure.
But it is unsure of which direction it wants to go and what kind of film it wants to be.
Netflix’s new prestige drama, The Dig is based on a true story. On the eve of World War II, a wealthy Englishwoman, Edith Pretty, (Carey Mulligan) hires the unlettered Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to excavate some earthen mounds on her property. The title of the movie is simultaneously straightforward and also metaphor and also metacognizant: where characters deliberately dig into the geography, searching for something meaningful and tangible, their emotions, prejudices, and fears lying beneath the placid surface of life in the east English countryside mutely push against the contours of that life, begging for excavation and exegesis.
What we get instead, under the impetus of the plot, fascinations of the director, and the gorgeous filming of the East England countryside is detour, various dead-ends, and dangling participants.
The film tries to be about many things: Class differences, snobbery, raw intellect versus educational pedigree, mothers and sons, would-be lovers, husbands and wives, life on the precipice of war, the past and the future, and existential dread. That’s quite a lot of movie there. There is so much here that the one hour and fifty-two minute running time seems like an…
