“Digger” is, by a country mile, the best movie of the year, an exuberant, maximalist comedy with more visual invention and conceptual ambition than any studio film since “One Battle After Another.” It’s also already one of the year’s most divisive movies, with reviews split almost evenly between defenders and detractors (the latter camp includes IndieWire’s own David Ehrlich).
As with two other movies that saw star Tom Cruise going for broke outside of his comfort zone — 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Magnolia” — “Digger” has seen its passionate advocates drowned out in the discourse by critics who charge it with being indulgent and pretentious. Both of those earlier films, of course, are now repertory staples that virtually everyone who cares about such things considers masterpieces.
Cruise’s performance as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell is a clear throwback to his dual triumph in 1999. His latest is a collaboration with a visionary auteur (Alejandro González Iñárritu) who, like Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson, capitalizes on our preconceptions of Cruise as a movie star and gives the actor a platform to move beyond them, to comment on and expand his own image — or, given Kazu Hiro’s stunning prosthetic makeup, to nearly obliterate it entirely.
In the film’s early scenes, Iñárritu and Cruise have fun with our perception of Cruise as a sort of deity of cinema who lives apart from the rest of us. Digger is wealthy, self-absorbed, insulated in his own reality, and sees himself as the center of the world in a way that many of us presume huge movie stars like Tom Cruise do. The layer of meta commentary on Cruise’s persona as a star deepens as the movie takes a wildly unexpected turn at the end of the first act, but I’ll stop there to avoid spoilers.
What I can say is that Iñárritu’s wild central conceit gives Cruise the biggest challenge of his career, and the opportunity to remind us that he’s not just the world’s biggest movie star but one of its best actors. In the last several years, we’ve gotten so used to Cruise as Ethan Hunt that it’s easy to forget that his resume has as much breadth and depth as that of any American thespian. Who else can boast a resume with performances as precise, varied, and original as “Risky Business,” “The Color of Money,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Collateral,” “Rain Man,” “Interview With the Vampire,” “Tropic Thunder,” and the aforementioned Kubrick and Anderson masterpieces?
Cruise acknowledged the role’s challenges in a Q&A I moderated with him, Iñárritu, producer Mary Parent, and actors John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, and Michael Stuhlbarg after a screening of “Digger” at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. “I had never read a character like it,” Cruise said. “It’s really three characters I’m playing.” Although Cruise has become one of the cinema’s most popular action heroes in films like the “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun” movies, “Digger” is a reminder of his verbal dexterity. There’s a 10-minute monologue in the middle of the movie that few actors could pull off as compellingly, a rant that’s hilarious, enraging, triumphant, and resigned in equal measures.
The speed and clarity with which Cruise delivers that monologue extends to his interactions with his co-stars in scenes that recall the whip-smart comedies of Preston Sturges in their fast badinage. Indeed, without giving away where “Digger” goes, since Iñárritu’s playful experimentation is one of the movie’s major pleasures (or irritants for the humorless critics who have dismissed the picture), one of the best things about it is its unique blend of references and influences.
I’m not sure what I was expecting going into the movie, but a cross between a Roland Emmerich disaster movie and John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night” was definitely not on my bingo card. Iñárritu acknowledged the “Opening Night” influence both in the film and in the Q&A, but for that rat-a-tat dialogue, he pointed back to the Hollywood comedies of the 1940s. “When we were together at Pinewood, we screened ‘His Girl Friday,’” Iñárritu said. “Howard Hawks was a master of that kind of speedy dialogue. Also, ‘To Be or Not to Be’ by Lubitsch.”
Iñárritu said that those movies, as well as “The Fireman’s Ball” and others, were reference points because they were comedies with heart, and this is another clue to what makes “Digger” special. Many comparisons have been made to Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” and “Digger” definitely shares that film’s sense of political absurdity and visual detail. But Iñárritu’s caricatures become people in a way Kubrick’s don’t; as the bewildered President, for example, John Goodman is simultaneously grounded and theatrical in his presentation, recalling his best work with the Coen brothers.
The other actors find a similar pitch, creating a distinctive tone that Goodman said came from an extensive rehearsal process. “We rehearsed in full makeup, and all of our equipment was there.” Goodman referred to his co-stars as “Ferraris,” and came into the rehearsals with the attitude of “let’s take this puppy out for a test drive. We went outrageous and stayed big, but kept it real. The script allowed us to do that. We had a ball — this was playing at its highest level.”
Calibrating that tone didn’t come quickly, however. Stuhlbarg noted a lot of trial and error before arriving at the version of the movie that made it to the screen. “We didn’t know which version of this we wanted to do,” he said. “We tried many, and found it as a group.”
“The energy on the set was really, really high, and the stakes were high,” Hüller added. Iñárritu acknowledged that some days the experiment just didn’t work. “Sometimes we were shooting, and we were pushing everything, and it was super fun,” the director said. “But then the next day I watched the dailies and said, ‘Fuck, this is horrible. This sucks. Let’s go back.”
Much of the attention on “Digger” so far has focused on Cruise’s performance, and understandably so — it’s big, bold, and attention-grabbing. But it’s also unexpectedly subtle in moments — so subtle that critics seem to have missed the nuances of what he’s playing as his persona deconstructs over the course of the film. But “Digger” is both a star vehicle and a great ensemble piece, where each actor — or, as Iñárritu calls them, each instrument in the orchestra — reveals new textures of their character on repeat viewings.
Stuhlbarg, whose Vice President tends to cower in terror in the corner of the frame, becomes particularly evident as the movie’s comic secret weapon upon closer examination. The first time you watch the movie, his impact is almost subliminal, but when your eyes become free to wander the frame a little more, the greatness of his performance becomes more evident. This speaks to another of the film’s strengths: the freedom Iñárritu offers the viewer through his VistaVision framing.
Utilizing the format’s high resolution and depth of field, the director packs his compositions but doesn’t dictate where the audience’s eye should go. It’s ironic that some critics have accused the movie of being heavy-handed or overstated, when Iñárritu instead exhibits a Renoiresque sense of democratic humanism in the equal weight he gives every element in the frame. Those elements, as is typical of Iñárritu, are as abundant as they are expressive and beautiful — any given shot in the movie could be hung like a painting, and each environment takes the actors’ work and develops it even further. (The production design of Digger’s home is particularly impressive in this regard.)
The result is something unique in contemporary Hollywood movies: an exquisite handmade epic (though that description could also apply to the other great studio movie of this year, Christoper Nolan’s “The Odyssey”). Credit must be given to Warner Bros. executives Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca for shepherding and encouraging personal filmmaking on this scale. Their championing of auteur movies and their willingness to support them at the level they deserve is laudable and rare — and it has led to most of the best films of the last few years, from “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” to “Weapons,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “Companion.”
To find similar consistency, one would have to go back to John Calley’s Warner Bros. regime in the 1970s, or Robert Evans’ hot streak at Paramount that yielded “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Godfather,” and “Chinatown.” It may seem premature to place “Digger” in that kind of esteemed company, but I’m willing to make the bet the same way I was when “Eyes Wide Shut” came out in 1999: that in a couple of decades people would love it as much as all of Kubrick’s other movies. Many disagreed with me, and they were on the wrong side of history — the same side the “Digger” naysayers will find themselves on 10 years from now.
