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Tom Cruise, American hero – or so the movies tell us – stars in Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s new satire Digger as Digger Rockwell, billionaire oil baron. His flesh is sagged and liver-spotted, and he holds, practically attached to his teat, a white cat that is in imminent transition to carcass.
At first, Digger’s concerns begin and end with this sickly feline – he dips his digits into a pot of pale meat paste to feed it; lets it urinate in his bed every night, for the maid to clean up; and fires the vet who implores him to put the poor creature down. Then, with the chirp of a phone notification, Cruise’s oligarch has his routine inconveniently interrupted by the end of the world. Digger is told that his Greenland oil rig has created a rift in the ice shelf, and a sizeable chunk of glacier is headed straight towards Norway, ready to cause the apocalypse. He hurries to shift the blame by proclaiming himself as both seer and saviour. He abuses the scientist, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), tasked with delivering the truth, pretending to fall asleep when he starts to list Digger’s many committed atrocities. And he communes closely with the President of the US (John Goodman), who won’t let us forget that he’s likely about to die from “cancer of the asshole” and harbours increasingly messianic delusions about his fate.
An Iñárritu film likes to talk at the same decibels as a trumpet fanfare. Mother bear digs its claws into opportunistic mankind in The Revenant (2015); in Birdman (2014), a camera sprints down backstage corridors to try and outrun an actor’s fast-approaching obsolescence. The Mexican director’s been (somewhat unfairly) maligned in the past because of how easily bravado can read as arrogance. Yet, in that respect, Digger is both his most ambitious work yet and one that arrives, in all its American grotesquerie, with the all the force of a light breeze. It’s simply not mean enough to mean enough.
Yet there’s a distinct romanticism about the whole affair, even with its meat paste-coated fingers, its lavishly foul language, Cosmo Sheldrake’s death rattle of a score, the way everyone looms over the camera like ravenous giants, the melted Norman Rockwell scenery outside the window, and the general sense in Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography that these events are taking place in a washed-out limbo. The cast all operate at a level of high farce: Ahmed has particularly fine comedic timing, while Sandra Hüller rants and raves appropriately as Digger’s half-sister.
As much as Digger has been sold on the promise that Cruise here is a revelation, there’s no real inversion to speak of, merely a return to the kind of work he did (over two decades ago!) before his blockbuster action streak. Even his latex makeover seems reminiscent of his paunchy, balding Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (2008). He’s dependably formidable. And magnetic. He delivers dialogue like he’s setting up a sniper shot. His blustering centrepiece is a speech delivered to the people about how their own attachment to convenience has made them complicit.
Yet while Digger might try to walk in the shadow of Dr Strangelove, it’s hard to match up Cruise’s evocation of the one per cent with the harsher reality that we’re all being duped and destroyed by the dumbest and most charmless people alive. Digger’s no Musk or Zuckerberg, and, next to Trump, Goodman’s preposterous president seems every bit the adult in the room.
But, aha, Iñárritu might object! The point of Digger is that it’s not quite what it seems. There is a carefully concealed metatextual element that opens the film up to constant self-examination. What is the point of satire? Is it distraction? Catharsis? A way to morally cleanse ourselves? Does it allow those in power to rewrite their narratives? Are we stupid to take anything Iñárritu shows us as sincere?
This element will undoubtedly work for some, and I admire Iñárritu at least for his boldness. (I do think cinema has more sway over society than Digger suggests.) But when you’re watching a film that doesn’t really seem to work, which then voluntarily indulges the suggestion that its very existence might be completely pointless – well, then, why did any of us, filmmaker or audience, bother in the first place?
Dir: Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Starring: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons. Cert 15, 129 minutes.
