FILM

“The Dig” is a “quiet” film, I was told. Soft. Contemplative. Perhaps so. But I heard loudly and clearly in screening this Netflix presentation of Simon Stone’s British film what it has to say about life, loss and most of all immortality. Based on a 2007 book of the same name by John Preston, “The Dig” dramatizes the true story of an excavation of a site in Suffolk, England, where a buried ship and its accompanying artifacts, dating back to Anglo-saxon times, were unearthed.

That in itself is intriguing, but “The Dig” is no stoical docudrama. Its protagonists are a widowed landowner named Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) and a crusty, dogged excavator (Ralph Fiennes) whom she commissions to explore the burial mounds on her estate. Each is a troubled but courageous soul; each, in different ways and without saying so, yearns for that aforementioned immortality.

“The Dig” is a beautiful film hindered only by more subplot complications than it needs. It also has, if you’ll excuse the play on words, dignity.