With spoilers, we look at the fascinatingly strange Digger, the missing shovel, and the glimpses of a very different ending not in the finished film.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Digger throughout. If you haven’t seen it yet, why not check out our spoiler-free review?
It’s hinted at in the title, it’s the character’s nickname, and it features heavily in the promotional artwork: a shovel. Early in Digger, we see that Tom Cruise’s titular Texas oil billionaire keeps a decades-old spade on the wall in his vast mansion. It is, he explains, the tool one of his ancestors used to strike oil years earlier – thus making it a symbol of his family’s ancestral wealth.
That battered shovel may also be a sign of how much Digger changed during its post-production phase. Head back to one of the film’s later trailers, released just two months ago, and there are flashes of what appear to be a rather different ending – one that brings back the central character’s prized spade for a final parade in front of the camera.
Did director Alejandro G Iñárritu change the conclusion at the last minute?
Before we dig into that question (sorry), let’s rewind a bit – and throw in a final warning for spoilers ahead.
As Digger opens, Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell emerges as an amalgam of the reclusive Charles Foster Kane and a past-his-prime Bond villain. Holed up in a leaky wood-panelled mansion, Digger’s closest companion is a white cat named Margaret – a scrawny feline that looks like Blofeld’s mog, but with an assortment of diseases that threaten to end its life at any minute.
Aging and death hang all over Iñárritu’s film. Cruise, clad in acres of prosthetics and makeup, plays Digger as a 20th century dinosaur clinging to his wealth and power in the face of ecological collapse. His close ally, President Compson (John Goodman) isn’t much less sick than Margaret the animatronic cat. The world itself is stricken and falling apart, partly thanks to Digger himself – one of his Arctic drilling operations has caused a massive rift to appear in a sheet of ice.
Digger ignores the repeated pleas from his workers that a catastrophe is about to happen, and he seems unmoved when a city-sized berg begins to drift towards Europe, threatening to kill millions. In the face of an apocalypse, Digger, the President and their superannuated cronies plan what to do next: the best they can come up with is a mixture of dissembling, praying and launching bombs at the gigantic iceberg, dubbed Judy.
In plot terms, this is broadly it: Digger’s characters all roaring, yelling and deflecting their way to the inevitable disaster. At points, Iñárritu pulls back to reveal a framing story that everthing we’re seeing happened decades in the past, and that the survivors of the catastrophe live in the aftermath of what Digger and his generation left behind.
Digger, we learn, died a lonely death on one of his oil rigs. The world is now flooded, and his various cooks and lackeys made off with all the food and a bunch of gold bullion. Still floating around in a cloud of self-delusion, Digger pauses for a brief conversation about mortality with his nephew, Kenny (who will grow up to become Jesse Plemons’ character, whom we met earlier in the story), then tosses both his dead cat’s ashes and himself into the roiling sea.
It’s a fittingly bleak end for a character whose impact on the planet will resonate for decades afterwards. With the world in control of a handful of rich sociopaths like Digger, Inarritu’s film suggests, the rest of us are essentially powerless: satire itself is useless, merely providing a moment of catharsis as the same old dynasties – as represented by Plemons’ faintly sinister Kenny – continue to control everything.
That’s a downbeat note to end your film on, certainly. But look back at the trailer from a couple of months ago, and there are hints that Digger would have hitched its pessimism to some sort of song and dance sequence.
In retrospect, that promo gives away pretty much the whole film, beginning with the earliest scenes of Digger in his house filled with taxidermied animals, his sneering response to the unfolding climate crisis, the various responses to the extinction-level flooding that engulfs Europe and later the world. But the trailer also indicates that Digger’s shovel would have played a far bigger role later in the film.
There’s a brief shof of the antihero clutching the shovel as he poses in front of a Stanley Spencer-ish painting of an oil refinery, one foot hovering above a globe. Cruise’s outfit – ten gallon hat, grey suit and bootlace tie – suggests that this would have taken place early in the second act, around the time Digger and his cronies are watching footage of a drowning Europe.
The more significant shots, however, are clearly taken from the ending, where Digger’s stuck on his oil rig with his half-sister Emma (Sandra Huller) and her young son, Kenny. You may have thought, watching the film, that Huller had little to do here; besides a mention of her running an green energy subsidiary of Digger’s firm, she barely figures in the plot at all.
Looking at the trailer, however, it seems that Huller would have been Cruise’s dance partner in a musical sequence; we can clearly see the two actors pirouetting around one another, Cruise clutching his shovel in his left hand.
There’s another brief shot in the same oil rig set, where Cruise does the splits, still clutching the shovel. Then we see him outside, strutting and dancing on a railing – yes, with the shovel in his hand.
In the finished film, the shovel is reduced to the first-act cameo mentioned at the top of this piece: a prop that Digger gets down off the wall, uses to illustrate his backstory, then leaves on the floor for his underlings to trip over. Unless this writer’s mistaken, it’s never seen again; certainly, there’s no sign of a dance scene anywhere. And in the final time we see Digger alive, standing outside looking out to sea, he’s clutching the remains of his cat, stored in a silver urn, and not the spade.
So what happened? Perhaps Inarritu and his collaborators decided that, given the disasters Digger has unleashed, a final Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire number might have seemed unearned. Or maybe Warner Bros, haunted by the box office of the musical-inflected sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, insisted it be cut out.
Whatever the reasoning, it looks as though the change was made quite late; Cruise’s dance with Huller is sprinkled liberally through the promo described above; the image of Digger clutching his spade has been a defining one for the marketing in general, right down to the Saul Bass-esque poster art. Even the final trailer, released in mid-September, still contains slivers of the song-and-dance sequence, and what appears to be an earlier shot of Huller dancing on a table in Digger’s mansion.
Iñárritu’s film makes repeated allusions to Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic, Dr Strangelove, from its tone to its cinematography to the use of music over the final shot. And there’s seemingly another, coincidental parallel between the two: Kubrick’s 1964 satire also had a deleted ending. As originally filmed, it would have concluded with a custard pie fight lasting roughly 11 minutes. Kubrick later decided to take the sequence out, fearing its tone was “too farcical”, and he ended the film on a more ominously mordant note instead.
Similarly, Iñárritu appeared to decide at some point that it was better to remove the showmanship and instead focus on the theme of ageing and death established in the film’s opening. Digger is a character who refuses to let go: of past glories, of his outdated mythologies and religion, of the idea that he can conquer everything – time, nature, even death itself. The scattered ashes and the tumble over the rail represent a final, belated acceptance of reality.
It’s a sign of a more thoughtful story buried beneath what Digger ultimately became: an aggressively loud, chaotic rave of a film that will likely baffle at least as many people as it captivates. Along with Iñárritu, there are four other writers credited to either the screenplay or the story. It’s likely that Digger’s production, its behind-the-scenes changes and the bizarre results, will continue to be raked over and dug into for years to come.
Digger is in cinemas now.
