Tom Cruise believes in the healing power of the movies. He wants us to all come together, under one roof — or several roofs, if it’s a multiplex — and bask in the projected glow of shadows on a wall. The star has dedicated himself with the fervor of a holy
crusader to the notion that, to quote his ex-wife, we are not just entertained but reborn when the lights go down and our collective dreams show up onscreen. And in these most troubling of ages, when artificial intelligence threatens our very existence and truth has become a battleground, the star wants to offer a salve, if not salvation. He wants us to laugh, and cry, and feel that, even though we seem to be hurtling ourselves headfirst into the void, we can always find common ground at a theater. Cruise is determined to put the “art” back in catharsis.
But first, he’s got to put on a fat suit and show his asscrack.
There’s roughly a generation or two of moviegoers who only know Cruise as the guy who either flies supersonic planes, straps himself to the sides of planes, or hurls himself out of planes — someone who takes the directorial command “Action!” to an insanely literal degree. Maybe they’d also heard that, once upon a time, our man jumped on Oprah’s couch. These folks don’t know about the other Tom Cruise, the actor who sought out arthouse heavy hitters and auteurs, and gave himself over to their visions. This is the one who shows up, locked and loaded and ready for duty, in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, one bumpy ride of a satire-slash-symphony of burning-Rome fiddlers. It’s a far, far more dangerous move for the star than doing his own stunts, though before the final curtain call, you may wish he’d simply risked life and limb at 25,000 feet. Big swings can win you games, make balls sail out of parks, get folks standing and cheering at witnessing someone going for it with all they’ve got. They can also result in the deafening whoosh of a massive swing-and-a-miss.
So there’s this guy named Digger Rockwell, see. Imagine a little bit of Ted Turner, a pinch of Edward Doheny, a few sprinkles of Bezos and Musk and Charles Foster Kane. That’s Digger. He’s an American Success Story on anabolic steroids, a relic of the 20th century that refuses to let the 21st century out of a stranglehold. The bigger-than-life business tycoon has made an extraordinary fortune out of fossil fuels; when he says he’s an oilman, you’ll agree. Clad in his go-to outfit of silk pajamas and snakeskin boots, Digger runs his empire from an estate that’s more mausoleum than mansion. When he’s informed that a crack near one of his drilling set-ups in Greenland seems to be getting bigger, and the methane gas is leaking from the ocean floor could cause a problem, the billionaire dismisses it as mere hooey. He’s too busy worrying about his terminally ill, conspicuously animatronic cat.
Except, well, a few minutes later, all of the king’s hoarse-voiced lackeys and all the king’s men are dealing with a Class A catastrophe. There’s been an explosion that has caused a giant ice shelf dubbed Judy, one roughly the size of Boston, to detach. It’s now headed toward Europe, where it will wreak trillions of dollars’ worth of damage, displace millions, cause untold disasters and megadeaths. A federal scientist named Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns Digger that this is just the beginning of what could be an extinction event. The President of the United States (John Goodman) and his cabinet of hawkish generals, gargoyle-ish officials, and speaking-in-tongues spiritual advisors gather at the oilman’s house to discuss next steps. Nuking the ice shelf is the popular choice of the military brass. Praying away the incident is also on the table. So is pretending none of this is happening. “With great power comes great deniability” is Digger‘s marketing slogan, meaning the funniest line isn’t even in the film itself.
Eventually, the sheer scale of the destruction requires a response. Digger decides he’ll take personal accountability for the situation the only way he knows how, i.e. sheer bluster, doubling down on the “you all need me, you love what I represent, I am Late Capitalism, destroyer of worlds” speechifying, and lots of general screaming and stomping around. It is, as the kids say, a lot. Iñárritu has been capable of subtlety in his movies, but you would not describe him as a subtle filmmaker. Give him and his longtime collaborator, the great cinematographer Emanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, an opportunity to do long takes with wide-angle lenses — all the better to emphasize the extremity and the absurdity of it all, my dear — and they’ll gleefully overdo it with gusto.
As for Cruise, he’s aiming his performance somewhere past the rafters and into the upper stratosphere. An over-the-top character like Digger Rockwell requires an over-the-top take, Foghorn Leghorn accent and all, and the movie star displays the same hyperfocused commitment of his action roles to this purposeful caricature of a carnivorous corporate predator. You can picture Les Grossman, Cruise’s studio executive from Tropic Thunder, watching the actor’s interpretation and going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa — too fucking much, guy!!!”
Digger preens and plods along like this for a while, a rough satirical beast slouching toward Bethlehem, a Southern-fried Dr. Strangelove in dire need of a Terry Southern. Desperate end times call for desperate measures, naturally. But there’s a secondary agenda afoot, another story thrumming underneath the wild flailing about, the washed-out gray visuals, and the wacky, dark-carnival musical score. Keen eyes may have noticed that one of the film’s first shots features a curtain and a proscenium. A later, lingering shot of a poster of John Cassavetes’ 1977 masterpiece Opening Night offers a bigger hint. Things get meta in a way that suggests a hard-left pivot toward Birdman-land. Or, to put it another way: Pretend you’re watching The Revenant, Iñárritu’s glorious, artisanal time machine back to the untamed American frontier, and a documentary about the making of The Revenant superimposed over the picture at the exact same time. Have you purchased your ticket yet?
So often, we wish that modern movies would offer reflection instead of escapism, that modern moviemakers would take real chances, that the last of the remaining A-list stars would lend their box-office power to original projects, and such a gathering of singular artists would use their talent and the transformational abilities of the medium to actually say something. Digger ticks all of those boxes, yet it is the sort of result that makes you wonder if you were accidentally holding a cursed monkey’s paw when you made that wish. The director and Cruise, as well as the crew and supporting cast — which also includes Sandra Hüller as Digger’s entrepreneur sister, Michael Stuhlbarg as a POTUS-adjacent toady, and Jesse Plemons as a tech bro on a mission — have purposefully given us something messy, ungainly, clever to a fault, and designed to play like a shriek of rage and pain. It’s impossible to simply dismiss as a mistake, and equally impossible to declare that it works in almost any capacity.
Look, if it’s the end of the world as we know it — given the half-hidden callback-cum-sick-joke that Iñárritu embeds in the end credits, one of the few genuine signs of inspiration here, the movie is suggesting it is — and Tom Cruise feels like getting weird like it’s 1999, who are we to deny him the right to do so? It’s just a matter of tolerance: How much all-caps TOM CRUISE IN LOONEY TUNES MODE is too much? Digger feels like it’s a bullhorn broadcasting that it’s too late, baby, while also issuing an urgent need to wake up ASAP before we’ve passed the point of no return. That mixed messaging matches what’s outside our doors, to be sure. Getting those conflicting messages via a this-TED-Talk-goes-to-11 lecture in a multiplex, however, makes you wonder if this movie truly knows how deep the hole is that it’s digging for itself.
Click here to read the full article.
