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“Digger,” starring Tom Cruise as a Texas oil tycoon who unleashes forces even more powerful than himself, is a movie that thinks it’s delivering something bigger than a mere message; it thinks it’s bringing us the word.
Cruise, under pounds of jowly make-up and thinning disheveled white hair, plays Digger Rockwell, an ancient Southern fossil-fuel titan who doesn’t just lord it over his company. He’s a man who rules the oil industry, and therefore rules America and maybe the world.
Cruise, declaiming every line, acting with blind bluster and a mean gleam of good-ol’-boy joy, makes Digger a walking cartoon — a larger-than-life satire of over-the-top American arrogance, like LBJ crossed with Foghorn Leghorn. The performance is very much of a piece with what Cruise did in his fat-suit cameo as the vulgarian studio executive Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.” At one point, Cruise wanted to make a Les Grossman movie, and in a certain way “Digger” is that movie — a chance for him to let it rip for two hours, to give the kind of stylized hambone performance that’s essentially a “Saturday Night Live” caricature, only executed with Method fullness. On its own terms, Cruise’s acting in “Digger” is well-played and skillfully etched. It’s fun — or, theoretically, it should be — to see him cut loose. But the character of Les Grossman was a trivial showbiz lark. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the director of “Digger,” has more serious things on his mind.
The movie is set in a not-so-distant future, where Digger wakes up in a mansion that’s as much of a gilded bunker as Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. (He sleeps with his fluffy white cat, who’s in the process of dying and is, for some reason, played by a fake mechanical cat.) Right off, Digger receives an alarmed communication from his henchman in Greenland, where it seems that the oil exploration has hit a snag. There’s a crack in the ice, just a few feet wide, but it’s getting larger by the minute. Digger says it’s nothing to worry about. His message is the same one he’s been running his company on for decades: Drill, baby, drill, and fuck the consequences.
Only this time the consequences aren’t cooperating. Years of climate abuse, of reckless drilling at the ends of the earth, have unleashed a wave of methane, which in terms of environmental destruction makes carbon dioxide look like laughing gas. An ice shelf, 400 miles wide, splits off from the glacier and starts floating toward Europe. It is set to collide with the continent and cause a tsunami, a mega-disaster, and mass death. Are we laughing yet?
“Digger,” with its countdown-to-Armageddon scenario, wants to be the “Dr. Strangelove” of climate change. It also wants to be the “Network” of climate change, and to radically up the ante on “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s finger-pointing satire of climate change. Did I mention that the movie is about climate change? I take that issue seriously, but at this point a movie like “Digger” is practically guilt-tripping its audience. It’s got us over an (oil) barrel: In its very extremity, the film is saying that the situation we face is so dire, so on the precipice of disaster, that if you watch this movie and somehow fail to embrace its “visionary” message of apocalypse now, you’re contributing to the problem.
But here’s the real problem: “Digger” isn’t funny. It’s nervy, in your face, adventurous, and bizarro in a free-swinging, out-of-the-box way. And it feels like a comedy, since it’s fueled by the relentless overacting of a bad Coen brothers movie. But “Dr. Strangelove,” built around the genius of Peter Sellers, was brilliantly funny. “Digger” borrows the doomsday architecture of “Strangelove” but leaves out the slyness, replacing it with a lavishly overscaled spectacle of browbeating.
Iñárritu, who wrote the script with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman, has staged the film as a baroque piece of visual fetishism, with ornately detailed sets and a showy monochromatic color scheme just this side of black-and-white. The film lets you know in every way that it’s offering audiences something different from what they’re used to seeing.
Yet I’m not sure that “Digger” is going to connect, because it’s so full of itself — so top-heavy with importance. The movie cost north of $125 million to make, and that figure is not only too big to probably justify itself; it’s a testament to the arrogance of the filmmakers — to the assumption that we’ll turn out in droves for this ponderous absurdist lecture. The movie treats Digger Rockwell as if he were a descendant of Daniel Plainview from “There Will Be Blood,” a film that was also too didactic for its own good, even as its message (capitalism: bad!) became catnip to a generation of movie buffs. “There Will Be Blood” was undeniably arresting. “Digger” is overbearing, complete with a Brechtian twist that’s both jaw-dropping and head-scratching. (You think, “Are they really doing this?” Then you think, “Why are they doing this?”)
Staging a movie of broad scolding maximalism isn’t the same thing as staging a movie of debonair satirical insanity. Along with Cruise, “Digger” features the dour theatrics of John Goodman, who glowers with one-note malevolence as the President of the United States, a character afflicted with “ass cancer” (are we laughing yet?), and also Sandra Hüller as Digger’s furious half-sister, who runs an environmental company — she’s there to symbolize the way “activism” is just a delusional bone that the oil industry throws at us. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, the close scientific adviser to Digger who is actually rooted in the real world, and therefore has to be the messenger of bad news. He becomes a frazzled, drunken mess.
There’s one sequence that gets your blood pumping, and that’s because of Cruise’s acting, and also because of what the scene is saying. As the world veers toward calamity, Digger stands before a global assembly (it looks like the UN of the future) and gives a speech explaining why the world has remained addicted to oil. It is, he says, because you want it that way — all of us who are hooked on 1,000 lifestyle choices, far beyond gasoline-fueled cars, that we don’t actually want to give up. It’s the film’s Howard Beale speech, and it’s bracing to see “Digger,” at least for 10 minutes, stop blaming the Usual Bad Guys, and to see Cruise deliver that message with a fire-and-brimstone glee. But then that theme slinks away, and it’s back to the accusatory disaster-movie gloom-mongering. And while I won’t reveal anything more about the film’s breaking of the fourth wall, let me just say this: It makes the movie, however unintentionally, seem to be about nothing so much as Tom Cruise taking on this role, and Iñárritu erecting the edifice for him to stand on. And that’s a tone-deaf mistake. It punches up the fact that we’re never going to solve the climate-change crisis until we disentangle it from the hot air of people celebrating themselves.
