This review contains minor spoilers.
Many talented people are involved in the new movie “Digger,” including its two-time Academy Award-winning director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Tom Cruise, arguably the most popular movie star in the world. “Digger” is ambitious, but taking risks isn’t enough; the gambles have to pay off. The movie is a $130 million (at a minimum) misfire on the scale that only A-listers such as Iñárritu and Cruise can get the money to create. The picture deserves some respect, but despite its worthy intentions, a generous budget and artistic credentials, much of what ends up on the screen is miscalibrated.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oilman whose latest explorations in Greenland lead to a global calamity of epic proportions. The tone is farcical. While Digger learns of his problem and culpability, he’s more concerned about his half-dead pet cat, played here by a sorry-looking mechanical feline. Digger tries to address the disaster by bullying, but the reality is so dire that his bluster fails. The U.S. government gets involved with the crisis, and a clichéd gaggle of militarists and politicians have several conferences about what to do. The attempted solutions only worsen the situation. Just about everyone overacts or yells or both.
While I admired “Birdman,” for which Iñárritu won his first Oscar, his work is not usually for me. Many of his other movies have a punishing idea of what makes art, and they rub your nose in their importance. “The Revenant,” which got Iñárritu his second Oscar, had Leonardo DiCaprio suffering for more than two hours on his way to survival, and audiences felt every moment of his torture.
Likewise, “Digger” tackles an urgent subject – ecological disaster – but the attempted satire is too heavy-handed to elicit more than occasional chuckles or mild amusement, and its message is too familiar. The movie reached its nadir for me when Cruise/Digger delivered a long oration to some sort of governing body – and by extension, the audience – and blamed them for his depletion of the world’s energy resources because everyone is addicted to things such as private jets and air conditioning. We are responsible for making Digger do what he does. I’m not a fan of sermons about waste from filmmakers who spend tens of millions of dollars on their artistic visions and who earn enormous salaries for their efforts to shame us.
An elaborate framing device for the main story is revealed about a third of the way into the picture. I won’t detail the exact nature of this device, but I’ll own that it adds interest (and at first, confusion) to the movie. The device’s ultimate purposes seem to be twofold. First, it allows the creators to rationalize the more excessive elements of “Digger,” such as its broad approach and that fake cat. Their defense fails; just because they tell us the exaggerations are intentional doesn’t make them any funnier. Secondly, this added structure provides opportunities for Cruise to act in a different style than the larger-than-life role of Digger allows. We’re expected to admire the contrast.
Which brings us to the Tom Cruise of it all. When the first trailer for “Digger” was released, two minutes of its 150-second running time was devoted to clips of past Cruise performances, with only a brief glimpse at the new picture. The message was clear: Look how great Cruise has been for more than four decades, and look at what he’s doing in “Digger,” and doesn’t he deserve a Little Gold Man? (He has an honorary Oscar, but although he’s been nominated a few times, he has never won a competitive prize.) In a vacuum, the promotional campaign worked for a while, with early pundits predicting a Cruise victory at the Oscars next year. After all, Iñárritu directed DiCaprio in the role for which he finally won his statuette; lightning could strike twice.
So “Digger” is Cruise’s return to acting with a capital “A” following decades of mostly starring in action movies. As Digger, Cruise is heavily made up, balding, overweight, older, speaking with an accent and playing a villain. Cruise has talent, and he’s hard-working — boy, is he ever! — and he is attempting a part out of his recent comfort zone.
But this performance seems less driven by matching him to his abilities and more by impulses to impress us. The role of Digger is akin to recent grandstanding performances such as those in “Joker” or “Darkest Hour” or “The Whale”; that is, physical, heavily made-up transformations by actors in showy roles that won awards. That long speech that Digger delivers is an opportunity for Cruise to showboat. The Oscar bait elements are so evident that they turn a critic into a cynic. Physical transformation? Check. Big speech? Check. Antihero? Check. Contrasting character? Check. (I should note, however, that since “Digger” has actually been seen by audiences, those optimistic predictions for Cruise’s Oscar have changed.)
John Goodman plays the president of the United States. In keeping with the movie’s satirical tone, he is photographed unflatteringly, but I’ll go one step further: I’ve never seen an actor who was made to look worse in a movie. It’s horrible. Sandra Hüller, a great actor in a minor role, is lost in the movie’s heightened atmosphere. Jesse Plemons, as a mysterious benefactor, underplays his one big scene and pulls it off, except he has been given a distractingly ugly haircut. Riz Ahmed, playing one of the scientific experts on call about the disaster, is the single actor here who manages to find a way to be comic consistently without overdoing it.
As is usual with many offbeat films, a small coterie of defenders is forming around “Digger” who admire it for not playing it safe. In my eyes, the chances it takes don’t pay off. I might have felt differently if, at a minimum, the comic elements were funny. They aren’t. Go see “Digger” if you’re the type of moviegoer who appreciates an interesting failure. Just don’t expect a good movie.
“Digger” Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Written by Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg. Rating: R. Running Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes.
