Where do you start with something like Digger? It’s smug, self-satisfied, cynical, but also genuinely bleak and actually pretty thoughtful. It wants desperately to be seen as satirical, but its target strangely seems to be mostly itself and anyone who finds it in any way provocative or funny. Speaking of funny, Digger is relentlessly unfunny, to the point where that anti-humor seems intentional — calibrated to be both misdirection and thematic lynchpin. It’s also a referendum on its key creative partners. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has spent the last decade-plus alone manufacturing aggressive, pretentious projects that strain productions with elaborate gimmicks (like the faux one take of Birdman or forcing everyone to freeze their asses off making The Revenant), and he’s garnered a couple Oscars for his trouble. His star in this case is Tom Cruise, Mr. Movies himself, the savior of cinema with his own line on elaborate productions and stretching human limits, and whose on-screen deification in the Mission: Impossible movies ended with Ethan Hunt keeping the most powerful force in human history literally in his pocket.
So what the actual fuck is going on with Digger?
Cruise plays the titular Digger, Digger Rockwell (sort of, more on that later), an old, foulmouthed, obnoxiously loud oil billionaire. He rambles around, cloistered in his mansion, barking orders at his miserable staff and looking after his positively ancient white cat Maggie, who seems either eager to die or at least deeply, soulfully ready. The cat is portrayed by a very effective but very deliberately obvious animatronic (once again, more on that later). One day, he is warned by his engineers, who have been drilling off the shore of Greenland, that a massive methane explosion is imminent. Indeed, said imminence arrives during that very warning, as it happens, killing all of those engineers and sending a massive iceberg hurtling toward Europe, which in turn causes a tsunami that will kills millions upon millions, finally igniting the ultimate climate catastrophe. One of Digger’s scientists, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), says there’s nothing to be done. The U.S. President (John Goodman) yells almost as much as Digger does, only he does it primarily about his “cancer of the asshole.” This reflects the first 35 or so minutes of Digger, and it’s excruciating — tin-eared to say the least, the sort of broad, self-congratulatory alleged satire that could only come from someone who thinks they’re smarter than you. And all of this is set against one of those irritatingly, insisting, antic scores (by Cosmo Sheldrake) that exists only to ramp up the level of shrill anxiety while still making sure you know it’s supposed to be funny.
What happens next is something the studio told critics not to reveal in their reviews — so beware before proceeding — but Digger is impossible to discuss without doing so, because the part of the film that they’re showing you in the trailers, the basic premise articulated in the previous paragraph, is one of the worst movies of the year, a sub-Gilliam-esque carnival of cluttered (and yet gorgeous) production design and screechingly awful “jokes.” But, in a moment unmistakably lifted from Gilliam’s own Brazil, this whole thing is revealed to be a play. A tech rehearsal for a play, to be exact. Fossil Fools is the name of the production, and it’s being produced in the future, 25-plus years after the events depicted actually took place.
So, and to be crystal clear, HUGE SPOILERS FOR DIGGER: Tom Cruise is actually playing an actor named Curtis Markson, who is playing Digger — and he’s upset about it a little because he feels like the characterization in the play isn’t realistic, that the farcical, exaggerated tone is deceptive and the satire unfunny and trite. Can’t say he’s wrong about that last part. But here’s the thing. Why any of this? In the world of the play, Cruise-as-Markson-as-Digger delivers a showstopping monologue in front of what could only be described as some Tribunal of World Leaders. It’s genuinely remarkable, the kind of all-gas-no-brakes stuff Cruise is terrific at, especially under all those prosthetics and the goofy costume. He’s leaping all over the place and shouting at the top of his lungs, telling Digger’s version of the truth about everyone’s dependence — even worship — of rich slimeballs like him and the world they’ve built for us, upon which (and whom, ick) we have become dependent. And given the meta-device of the play, is it a problem that this pretty amazing performance never feels once like we are not watching Tom Cruise do his act? Or is that exactly the point? Digger doesn’t know. It’s happy just to be asking, and your mileage will vary as to how annoying that is. All of the other performances are pitched at a similar volume as this, but we learn exactly nothing of the other “actors” giving these portrayals (none of the “real-world” counterparts have any interiority or character detail beyond Curtis, who is grappling with the possible disappearance of his daughter), other than the mysterious Kenny (Jesse Plemmons), who seems to be financing this whole operation.
Certainly the literal artifice of the entire affair is astounding. The deliberately obvious animatronic cat is one thing, but even without the added element of the play within the story, the production design (by legendary Bond veteran Dennis Gassner) is beautiful to look at. Painstaking miniatures displaying their obvious seams intercut with the more “convincing” illusion we see in the “story.” It’s almost like looking at a live-action version of one of Wes Anderson’s animated films, but combined with Roy Andersson or Yorgos Lanthimos, with their locked-down cameras, fish-eye lenses, and intense obsession with physical absurdity and garishness.
By the time Digger ends, we’re left with a couple of big questions. Is the telling of the story of Digger Rockwell — accurately or otherwise — a worthy outlet for anger, a galvanic and cathartic salve for a society that struggles every day to compute the horrible world we live in that seems to be getting worse by the moment? Or is it a pathetic refuge, a pillow to bury our heads under while the shit continues to hit the proverbial fan? In either case, nothing is truly accomplished by the production of Fossil Fools. What does that say for Iñárritu? What does it mean for an artist to contort himself and his crew and his work so intensely only to produce something so deliberately and fundamentally hopeless? And then there’s Cruise, who has been hot on the promo trail for years about his love of storytelling and the collective power of cinema, of gathering in a room to share our hopes and dreams as a group. It’s impossible to view this film as anything less than a dismantling of that idea. Ultimately, it’s possible to view Digger as a huge artistic swing, a stunning and hubristic artistic failure, a sobering commentary on The Way We Live Now, an oppressive but empty and shallowly unprovocative look at The Way We Live Now, and a career summation (good and bad) for two pretty big wheels in the world of mainstream cinema, all simultaneously. But so what? Digger doesn’t know, which might be entirely the point.
DIRECTOR: dAlejandro González Iñárritu; CAST: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 2; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 9 min.
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