Regardless of its reception, “Digger” will go down as the last film released by Warner Bros. prior to its official merger with Paramount, marking the end of an era in Hollywood. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eighth feature film examines the value of creativity at a time when reality has become stranger than fiction.
Iñárritu teams up with Tom Cruise for a scathing examination of society’s downfall. “Digger” is an audacious climate-change, meta-satire film following Digger Rockwell (Cruise), nearly unrecognizable in a full prosthetic body suit, as a billionaire Texas oil tycoon.
The film opens as Digger dotes on his beyond-ailing, theatrically atomic cat. He ignores advanced warnings, which ends in an apocalyptic disaster at his oil rig that causes thousands of deaths. Summoned to a crowded war room, inside of which sits the president (John Goodman) and lead scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger insists he is not to blame for planetary devastation and demands firewalls for narrative control.
Iñárritu channels his previous works, “Birdman” and “Bardo,” with artistic self-delusion, where characters rationalize living in a world that abandons logic. The urge to control how people view the disasters during the film becomes synonymous with the way moviegoers see the story unfold.
Roughly 40 minutes into “Digger,” it is revealed that audiences are not watching a movie, but a dress rehearsal for a play, “Fossil Fools,” depicting events that happened in the world of the movie many years ago. Cruise portrays the actor Curtis Markson, who plays the infamous Digger and, during costume changes and set transitions, becomes increasingly distraught about the disappearance of his daughter’s flight from Jamaica, making him uncertain about his character.
This play-within-a-movie concept created the largest split among critics.
Cruise’s fan base and other cinephiles praise the film’s overly theatrical stylistic choices and metafiction. The play stresses the results and reality both the audience and actors are living in, the world Digger created. The play’s extravagant acting and effects are due to an exaggerated production.
Cruise’s secondary character, Curtis, becomes a victim to the character he is playing. While Digger is charismatic, ridiculous and terrifying — Cruise brings back the ego-driven and short-tempered bluster of the executive he played in “Tropic Thunder” — Curtis is a method actor hiding behind the persona of the arrogant billionaire. He is a scared and vulnerable dad worrying about his daughter, living in a world that Digger left behind for him.
Although an unconventional or predictable film can be a positive element in a film, it does not automatically make the film good.
The pessimistic critics say the film lacks subtlety. “Digger” insists upon itself and is “in-your-face” with its satire. A group catharsis of cheering against a supervillain will only ever come when that supervillain dies, because the structure of capitalist society will support and prop the supervillain up — as long as there are profits to be made — until the doomsday clock has already set off rang multiple times multiple fires.
Cruise’s notably arrogant performance was his lengthy capitalistic speech pointing fingers back at the people, as he is merely fulfilling the people’s need for unsustainable resources. The supply-and-demand excuse for ending the modern world synthesizes and satirizes Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in “There Will Be Blood.” Like many of Iñárritu’s previous films, this felt more like an analytical exercise than a movie that’s meant to provoke a response.
Characters are exaggerated, occasionally drawing out the severity of situations with hollow laughs, like Goodman’s presidential “cancer of the a—–e” bit.
The only issue with Cruise claiming the majority spotlight is that no one else has much time to shine. While Goodman is enjoyably crooked, and Ahmed has a memorable drunken scene, their time on-screen is relatively brief and remains in Cruise’s shadow. There’s too little of co-stars Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons and Emma D’Arcy to leave notable impressions on the audience, giving Cruise more room to exercise his historically underused dramatic range.
Ultimately, “Digger” is bold both in subject matter and construction. There is something fitting for a movie about division, hypocrisy and the ability to ineffectively agree on how to address a problem becoming this very divisive movie itself. “Digger” will likely be seen as an original failure, with not many viewers able to make sense of it. The push that art is all that is left to a dying world because it is too late for anyone to change it reads as a dull, empty message. The only agreeable factor is the sad truth: The hole is so deep there is no digging out of it.
