There’s only so much one can say about Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Digger without dipping into spoiler territory. Warner Bros. has asked those of us writing about it to avoid revealing plot points in our reviews beyond what’s necessary, and I’m honor-bound to respect that here. One doesn’t need a spoiler warning to say that it’ll be “divisive” or “weird” or that “Tom Cruise gives a very different performance than you’re used to!” Nor does one need to break into the HTML tags to “click to reveal” that it sucks and is most likely a waste of one’s time, unless you’re faced with the choice of seeing this or, say, visiting a malicious ex-CIA manicurist whose idea of a manicure is plucking your nails out one-by-one with rusty pliers. If the latter or an equivalent is your only other option, by all means, you should see Digger.
Of course, I’m exaggerating when I say that, but Digger is nothing if not hyperbolic. It’s thuddingly obvious — every single one of its talking points is delivered in patronizing all caps — and it’s directed by a man whose idea of comedy begins and ends with his cast yelling one blunt punchline after another. The set design is excessive yet austere, and Emmanuel Lubezski’s cinematography has never looked flatter or more lifeless, which I guess is an ironic concession to the limitations of the VistaVision widescreen format.* The sound design is so bombastic it caused the screen to ripple in my theater, as if to constantly remind the audience to stop looking at their watches or considering a run to the bathroom in the off-chance that something might happen. The funny outfits and prostheses are there too, though they are mostly limited to Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, a balding, beer-gutted oil tycoon in his mid-60s who looks like what Stable Diffusion would spit out if you asked it to generate an image of the actor as J.R. Ewing from Dallas, only you won’t have the luxury of a mid-shower Patrick Duffy to tell you that the entire production of Digger was just a bad dream.
Each contradiction in Digger’s character is more incongruous than the last, and they ultimately cancel each other out. He loves his old and decrepit cat (who is also a terrifyingly fake puppet), but he is almost wholly indifferent to nature and what he’s doing to it. He ignores his climate scientists, best represented by the meek Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), but is seemingly on their side when push comes to shove. He pretends to care about what his daughter (Sandra Huller) thinks but is secretly prepping to short her carbon-capture company. When a large portion of an ice shelf breaks off due to his company’s drilling operations and threatens to annihilate Europe, he agrees with the President (John Goodman) that they should block all social media communication and bomb the goddamned thing. Yet when he’s asked to give a speech to the European Parliament — rendered here like the Roman Senate in Renaissance painting — he is brutally honest and musters a defense that damns all in the room for their hypocrisy. It’s a character that never adds up to much, with Cruise doing a riff on his Les Grossman routine from Tropic Thunder, albeit chicken-friend, hoping laughter might work as water and the sentiments as a binder to give the shredded script a papier-mâché form. But that may give Iñárritu too much credit, and Cruise not enough blame.
Going full “auteur theory”, had Iñárritu used one of his four credited writers to craft funny material or to home in on the earnestness of his appeal, there might have been something there for Cruise to work with. But Digger is a fundamentally insecure film, which is par for the course for the director following critically reviled attempts at creating vulnerable art. Biutiful was a maudlin tragedy that barely saw release in the States, and the one-two punch of Birdman and The Revenant can be considered a form of hedging. If one tone didn’t work, well, he’d have the other to fall back on. Fortunately, both gambits paid off, with Birdman being an unqualified success, complete with the ultimate validation at the end of its run. He then spent seven years working toward Bardo, a deeply personal feature that saw him working through his regrets and fears in a Felliniesque cinematic language, flush with Netflix money. It bellyflopped come awards time and was mocked by a decent number of critics, all of whom had sharpened knives at the ready following his Oscar wins.A return to detachment, to irony — this time besotted with purpose — was in order, and one can see this in how thoroughly it resembles Birdman. That there’s a metatextual element to this film should be self-evident, but its application feels
Equally likely is the idea that Cruise, one of the creative masterminds of this project, much like his projects at Paramount, got himself a patsy and told him to shut up and play the hits. Not to go full conspiracy-theory mode, but Jez Butterworth’s name stands out among the usual Iñárritu crew of story contributors and screenwriters. He previously wrote Edge of Tomorrow for Cruise and Doug Liman, and I imagine his presence here was in part to give the star a voice in the writing room. Digger’s contradictions feel less like shading (especially in-text) and more like image-conscious attempts to massage his ugliness – which, ironically enough, could be further explored but isn’t. A broader, more miserable caricature is called for, given the circumstances, but the film makes a lot of effort to get us to like him. He’s right about everything (unless a given scene calls for him to be wrong before he reveals he’s right), and in some ways he functions as the film’s conscience, which makes no sense whatsoever. Cruise never seems like he wants laughter as much as he wants recognition — the whole reason he’s doing this is, after all, to reclaim critical respect — but it’s too self-protective to be biting, and Cruise is never given a chance to be Digger Rockwell, only to ham it up in search of a joke that’ll stick. But, frankly, it’s a genius plot: if it all goes wrong, folks like me who dislike Iñárritu’s work will blame the director, and he’ll skate by. He’s Tom Cruise, dammit.
Digger proudly cites its influences frequently, often to disappointing returns. A poster for Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be appears in one scene**; echoes of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove resound through the set design and apocalyptic tone; and the broad appeals of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator appear in the speeches delivered by several characters. Strangelove has been the most-cited among early reactions because it’s our default art-satire point of comparison, but, beyond a stylistic kinship, Digger shares little with Kubrick’s masterpiece in sensibility and tone. There’s no room for the absurdity to breathe, no departures from Cruise, who is on screen nearly every moment, and the Ink Spots, substituting for Vera Lynn, are played out. Theoretically, someone could claim they’re both unfunny, but they’d be wrong. In my opinion, it’s way more like The Great Dictator or the vastly underrated Southland Tales, but it lacks two essential assets. Those, friends, are ambition and conviction.
If ambition is “big sets” and “loud performances” or “audience alienation,” sure, it’s ambitious. But if it’s innovative or risky or any quality beyond scope, it fails to pass muster. First, I don’t know whether traditional Hollywood narratives can handle climate change within their strictures. Outside of depicting a post-apocalypse or dystopian future, they’re often best suited to acute, spectacular problems rather than slow-moving, hazy ones.*** Second, the film lacks the unsparing wit of Terry Southern or the tightly knotted thriller backbone that Peter George’s Red Alert gave it. The writers penned themselves into a corner by even having to entertain the suspension of disbelief, which is dumb and a topic for another day. They also make the same mistake every modern-day riff on The Great Dictator’s speech makes in that they forget the context of those words — a silent film icon, going against every one of his established artistic impulses, talking directly to an audience he’d held for decades to stress a point, ending in a rousing appeal to their better instincts— and Cruise proceeds to insult the people he’s lecturing after a pivot to Gordon Gekko land. Unlike Chaplin, he never breaks the fourth wall, barring one moment when he picks up a smartphone during his lecture and briefly looks into the camera.
But it’s the lack of conviction, the cowardice, that is particularly galling. Those three films I cited didn’t have much to defend outside their ideals, and they worked as entertainment while achieving their larger goals. Southland Tales was different – Richard Kelly blowing out his cachet in Hollywood in spectacular fashion to deliver what might be the best portrait of the Bush years committed to celluloid. Like Heaven’s Gate, the perception of it as a flop colored it as one, but Kelly did his best to stand by his film, and never deviated from the world he’d created. It was patently ridiculous, but then again, it was a ridiculous moment in history, and he never felt compelled to mount a defense or shoot something to try to mitigate the bad press. The film was what it was, and you could feel the strength of its beliefs even through moments that would have made a ‘00s teenage cinephile cringe, and, goddamn it, it was good. Contrast that with Iñárritu and Cruise, who are most concerned with insulating their aesthetic choices, and Cruise himself, from criticism and do so in the tackiest possible way.
Think the cat looks like an ugly puppet? There’s a reason for that. Think Cruise’s performance is all over the place? There’s a reason for that. Think it’s not funny? You guessed it — don’t blame the bad writing; it’s meant to suck. Worse, this could have worked with an extra iota of thought, but the film thinks its corners are straights and plows right into the guardrails. If it lacks the conviction to stand by its weirdness, how can one believe anything it’s trying to impart? Early on, we get a glimpse of what that movie might look like, and sure, it sucks, but it feels like the brassy, ugly, ferociously strange comedy that Iñárritu and Cruise set out to make. Those awkward-as-hell moments are at least brave, since they’re far outside the star’s wheelhouse and Iñárritu’s typical approach to “comedy.” None of this had to be true, but in trying to reach a compromise between brand maintenance, hoary pretension, and being an “issues” film, Digger tries to have it all and winds up tapped-out, dry as hell, finger guns shooting blanks, unable to shovel itself out of the shit.
* This, incredibly, is a joke about film processing.
** Another poster is clearly visible at one point, but spoilers prevent me from cracking open that chestnut.
*** I went into this when writing about Don’t Look Up, so I’ll refrain from repeating those arguments.