FILM
The Dig turns out to be a gentle, gorgeous-looking film that provides a near-perfect balm for these difficult times. Starring the delicious combination of Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, it tells the story of the famous archaeological dig that took place at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk just before the Second World War, although perhaps not in a way that can be taken as hard historical fact. That’s because Moira
Buffini’s screenplay is based on John Preston’s 2007 novel rather than an authoritative work of nonfiction. History, in other words, has been given a bit of a helping hand.
Fiennes plays the Suffolk-reared Basil Brown, who prefers to describe himself as an excavator rather than an archaeologist, and arrives at Sutton Hoo to explore the strange mounds that fascinated Edith Pretty (Mulligan) and her late husband from the moment they bought the estate. Now she wants to discover what’s buried there before the muchanticipated war breaks out.
Suffolk-born himself, Fiennes certainly gives the local accent plenty but it works well, thanks to the convincing screen chemistry he strikes up not just with Mulligan – looking enigmatic but fabulous in the fashions of the day – but with Archie Barnes too, who is terrific as Edith’s imaginative and talkative young son, Robert. Other secondary characters are slightly less successful, with Lily James, Ben Chaplin and Johnny Flynn arriving rather too late to hold our interest as a potential love triangle. But the damage isn’t serious – if you like films such as A Month In The Country, with Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh, The Go-Between and Their Finest, you’ll love this.
‘There’s no singing, no dancing and no happy ending,’ warns a narrator at the beginning of Twist, which suggests its makers are keener to distance themselves from Carol Reed’s much-loved musical Oliver! rather than Charles Dickens’s original novel.
Uncompromisingly updated to the present day, Oliver is now… wait for it… a twentysomething, free-running graffiti-artist – played by Jude Law’s son, Raff – who falls in with a gang of faintly lovable young thieves dispatched around London by their ageing boss, Fagin, played by a game but frail-looking Michael Caine.
What ensues involves an art scam almost as muddied as the underlying morality, Rita Ora having a go at acting as ‘Dodge’, and Game Of Thrones star Lena Headey as a positively psychopathic Sikes. It’s not a disaster but… please sir, I’m not sure I want any more.