A muted drama about excavating the past

 

   In The Dig, a British widow with an interest in archaeology wants to conduct an excavation on her land. To make her dream a reality, she hires an excavator known for his meticulous work.

   Director Simon Stone adapts a novel by John Preston to tell the story of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo, the site of medieval burial mounds where an Anglo-Saxon ship was found. 

    The distant past becomes shockingly present when the ship is unearthed, a piece of history to be exhumed and then memorialized.

    The subject of excavation could have given the filmmakers an opportunity to connect us with the majestic erosions of time and forgotten people — if only for a moment or two.

    Instead, director Stone and screenwriter Moira Buffini serve up a  period piece that neither is tense nor sorrowful enough to transcend the status of a dry — or at least “dryish” — footnote, a strange outcome considering how often the story is drenched in Suffolk downpours.

    Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty, the pallid careworn woman who owns the property on which the dig will take place. 

     Ralph Fiennes portrays Basil Brown, the man who conducts the dig at Edith's request. Edith also has a young son (Archie Barnes) who's interested in the dig and begins to bond with Brown.

     Stone seldom brings the material to a dramatic boil. There's not much tension, for example, in wondering whether Edith will give her find to a local Suffolk museum or to the more prestigious British Museum.

    The major issue involves attempts by the British museum -- under an esteemed archaeologist played by Ken Stott -- to take control of the project. Without formal credentials, Brown might be pushed aside.

    A digressive subplot finds Lily James's Peggy working at the site with her husband Stuart (Ben Chaplin). James and Chapin portray a couple on shaky ground.  Edith's cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) arrives to help Brown and to become a potential love interest for the sexually deprived Peggy. Her husband regards marriage as a bit of a formality to cover his real sexual interests.

   Mulligan gives a reserved performance compared to her work in A Promising Young Woman. Fiennes creates a man of the lower-classes who has developed and honed a specialty. Some of the people who've worked with Brown think he's "difficult," but for the most part he seems agreeable.

    Stone adds a sorrowful twist involving Edith's lingering illness --  that and her fear about the looming war. 

   Although this period piece may not be lacquered, it lacks the kind of animating energy that would have made it more interesting and too many of its various plot threads feel undernourished. As it stands, the dig might be more interesting than most of the characters. 

    Perhaps that why when I think of the movie in retrospect, I almost hear the sound of trowels digging quietly and determinedly in the Suffolk soil.

A lukewarm helping of Woody Allen

Allen travels back to the 1930s for Cafe Society.

There was a time when a Woody Allen movie felt as if it were entirely of its moment. Anticipation for each new Allen movie ran high whether the director was operating in comic or serious mode. Then came scandal, the onslaught of age and a changing movie environment.

These days, a Woody Allen movie seldom feels like an occasion marked by urgency, so it's probably not surprising that Allen's latest -- Cafe Society -- retreats into the 1930s for a story split between Los Angeles and New York.

Though hardly a knockout, Cafe Days qualifies as a showcase of sorts, less for Allen than for his production designer, Santo Loquasto, and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. Between them, they create a Los Angeles blessed by pre-pollution light and fashionable ease.

Allen's screenplay doesn't exactly break new thematic ground as it toys with issues involving love, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and navel gazing about mortality.

The story centers Bobby Doorman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Bronx kid who travels to California in search of a career. Bobby hopes that his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) will help him get his feet on the ground.

Phil, you see, is one of Hollywood's top agents, a guy who knows everyone.

Bobby's parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) disagree about whether Phil will be of much help. Mom says, "yes." Dad is skeptical, but his wife dismisses him as "stupid."

Phil gradually accepts Bobby as a trusted ally. Blood ties, after all, are stronger than the tenuous threads that stitch Hollywood alliances together.

Meanwhile, the story keeps a foot in New York, where it follows the development of Bobby's older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster whose power grows along with the number of bodies he buries in the cement of metropolitan area construction sites.

Allen -- again with Storaro's help -- has done something I didn't know was possible. He has made Kirsten Stewart, who portrays Phil's secretary, look like a movie star from another era. I don't think anyone has ever made Stewart look more classically beautiful.

Predictably, young Bobby falls for Stewart's Vonnie. The complication: Vonnie is the midst of an affair with her married boss, Carell's Phil. Will Vonnie realize that Bobby is the perfect man for her or will she cling to Phil?

Blake Lively enters the movie late; she plays Veronica, a woman who captivates Bobby -- at least briefly -- when he returns to New York to run Les Tropiques, a nightclub that his older brother Ben has acquired through thuggery.

All of this is narrated by Allen, making Cafe Society seem like one of Allen's New Yorker short stories. The movie passes easily, except for a couple of clinkers. A riff about one of the character's 11th hour conversions to Catholicism (it has an afterlife, Judaism doesn't) and an early-picture bit in which Bobby meets with an inexperienced hooker fall flat.

As the stand-in for the kind of character Allen once played, Eisenberg does well enough; Carell conveys Phil's self-assurance along with bouts of torment, but it's Stewart who emerges as the prize in Allen's ensemble.

Allen eventually unites the New York and Los Angeles parts of the movie, but the dramatic stakes seldom seem high enough to elevate Cafe Society above a lukewarm period piece about a couple of characters who obsess over the lives they might have led.

Different costumes and new actors can't disguise the fact that for Allen, Cafe Society is more of the same -- and the lesser for it.