A shame, then, that The Dig gets sidetracked by a subplot that sees Lily James’s real-life archaeologist Peggy Piggott falling for Johnny Flynn’s fictional airman Rory Lomax, a distraction that feels as though it has been foregrounded simply to broaden the film’s appeal to younger audiences, rather than as an organic addendum to the central story.Īltogether more integral is Basil’s increasingly paternal relationship with Edith’s son, Robert (Archie Barnes), the young boy finding solace from the distressing realisation of his mother’s ailing health in the company of someone who has a touch of eternity about him. That’s an accurate description, despite a distant echo of the repressed longings that underpinned Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. In a recent interview, Fiennes described Buffini’s script as “a story of kindred spirits” that is “not clouded by love or romance”. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Ken Stott takes a broadly written caricature of academic archaeologist Charles Phillips and keeps it just the right side of credible, personifying the snobby establishment who march in to take credit for Basil’s discoveries, looking down their noses at Brown whom they consider to be little more than a labourer – an earth mover. Plaudits, too, to Monica Dolan, who makes the most of a supporting role as Basil’s wife, May, breathing years of history into a few fairly short exchanges, telling us more about their life together in a fleeting glance or a tentative touch than any amount of expository dialogue. There’s an admirable eloquence to Fiennes’s portrayal of Brown, from the studied precision of his very specific Suffolk accent to the way his gaze alters as he looks from the sod to the stars, finding equal time-travelling wonder in both worlds. In a film defined by understatement, it’s the little details that matter.
“My interest in archaeology began like yours,” Edith tells the initially sceptical Basil, “when I was scarcely old enough to hold a trowel.” So begins an unlikely friendship between two very different people, both of whom believe that “it speaks, the past”. By contrast, Carey Mulligan’s Edith Pretty is a wealthy widow whose extensive land includes a series of imposing earth mounds, which she enlists Brown to excavate.
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