Tom Cruise teams with Oscar-winning director Alejandro G Iñárritu for a bizarre apocalyptic satire. Our review of Digger:
Here it is: Tom Cruise’s big play for an Oscar. After years of running around and clinging to the sides of various aircraft, Digger presents an opportunity for Cruise to get back to an earlier leg of his career, when he was putting in committed work for the likes of Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick. And, like Charlize Theron’s turn in Monster or Brendan Fraser in The Whale, Digger offers one of those transformative roles that requires piles of prosthetics and makeup – the twinkling smile and faintly off-kilter charm that made Cruise a star are nowhere to be seen here, in the latest film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
In place of Hollywood charm, we get Digger Rockwell, the paunchy, late-middle-aged Texas oil baron, whose drilling operation has created a catastrophe in Greenland that threatens to turn into a globe-wrecking environmental crisis. Rockwell, who’s a close acquaintance of a deathly ill, Trumpian US President (John Goodman) deals with the situation in his own way – by deflecting blame away from his own greed-first decision-making, and then… well, that’s pretty much all he does.
Digger gives Cruise numerous opportunities to grandstand and spout lengthy monologues, but his character is essentially a passenger – the focal point for a domino effect of increasingly bizarre events mostly seen on televisions or talked about in airless conference rooms. Iñárritu appears to be rather boldly attempting an amalgam of Citizen Kane and Dr Strangelove here – at times, his latest opus vaguely resembles a character study about an eccentric billionaire, at others it’s a satirical screed about the wilful destruction of our planet.
Rockwell lives a solitary existence in a Xanadu-like mansion, where his companionship comes in the shape of his various servants and hangers-on, and a zombie-like animatronic cat named Margaret. But then the bawdy humour, amped-up performances and apocalyptic tone are more like Stanley Kubrick than Orson Welles.
The problem is that Iñárritu lacks Kubrick’s ability to match absurdist humour with stark detachment. Digger is like Dr Strangelove edited down to only the moments where George C Scott does accidental somersaults and rants about the ‘big board’. In fact, that still doesn’t get across how aggressively, constantly shrill Digger actually is. Cruise’s Rockwell makes Al Pacino’s Scarface look like dramatic understatement; there are times where John Goodman is screaming and drawling so loudly that he becomes uintelligible, like the squawking of multiple terrorised chickens.
Here, Digger almost becomes a Lovecraftian nightmare: an experience that, on an IMAX screen, feels so loud that reality itself seems to be tearing; through that rip in our perception, we can almost see madness beckoning with a bony finger.
Adding to the oppressive atmosphere, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki constantly shoots from a low angle – and maybe it’s this writer’s broken mind playing tricks, but the camera seems to decrease in altitude as the film unspools, until we’re next to Cruise’s feet and staring directly up at his nostril hairs. The faces of supporting players like Riz Ahmed’s Ganesh (a scientist who’s nominally the film’s moral conscience, but spends much of the story drunk) look stretched and distorted.
In places, Digger resembles nothing less than a $130m hall of mirrors.
It doesn’t help that the sentiments on Digger’s mind are written in 48 point type and underlined twice in red pen: the world is run by awful old white men who care only about maintaining their own wealth – an observation that would have felt more bold in the Reagan era. Almost every scene draws another line under the sentiment, then circles it again in case we weren’t paying attention.
In Iñárritu’s defence, Digger isn’t merely a satire about the fossil fuel industry or about our collective inability to address the climate crisis. Rather, it’s a satire about satire itself – how toothless it can be, how it plays to the gallery, how little it truly affects change.
As Digger goes on, Iñárritu channels a bit of Wes Anderson here, a bit of Charlie Kaufman there, and the design of the practical effects and set design is quite captivating. But for all the visual ingenuity on display, and no matter how much Cruise and supporting actors like Ahmed, Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons strain every sinew, Digger leaves us little to cling onto. There’s emoting but no emotion, chaos but no pathos. It isn’t a portrait of a fascinating monster, like Charles Foster Kane; it isn’t an angrily cutting reflection of mutually assured destruction, like Dr Strangelove. In its hectoring emptiness, it more closely resembles such antic, unfunny misfires as David O. Russell’s Amsterdam or David Koepp’s Mortdecai.
No other recent film in recent memory has been so self-deprecating about its own lack of strength as an impactful work of art – or, perversely, as convinced of its own brilliance as a piece of febrile comedy. Coffee machines falter and spew their contents on a Vice President’s shirt; flowers fall off an orchid one by one; characters repeatedly fall over the same prop lying on the floor. These little gags have no set-up or pay-off; they’re simply inserted into a scene in the hope of generating a laugh.
Other plot elements hang just as uneasily. Rockwell keeps an old shovel on his wall as a self-mythologising symbol of his roots – his great grandfather used it to dig up the first seam of oil that made his family rich for generations. Rockwell’s terminally ill cat, brought to life using intentionally unrealistic animatronics, isn’t here to humanise the antihero, but instead to make another satirical point about his arrogance in the face of the inevitable.
Iñárritu became an Oscar darling with widescreen epics like The Revenant and the more intimate, off-beat drama of Birdman. Digger was intended, perhaps, as an amalgam of the two: an apocalyptic comedy with the ambition of the former and the stylistic playfulness of the latter. But as admirable as its intentions are, and as hard as everyone is clearly working to turn folly into brilliance, the result is a bizarre chimera that will likely trigger conversations about exactly what went wrong rather than the urgent topics it so aggressively highlights.
Digger is in UK cinemas from the 2nd October.
