‘Digger’ Review: Tom Cruise Shouts Into The Void In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Overloaded Environmental Allegory

Digger‘s problem may be that it thinks of itself as a comedy. Or, more precisely, that it was conceived, at least in part, as one. Approached that way, as a satire about looming environmental collapse and the pompous officials and business titans who botch their response to it, it’s hard to imagine anyone laughing. I’ll admit I have little patience for this brand of broad, bombastic, grandiloquent humor to begin with (Dr. Strangelove, its obvious model, never did much for me either), but the regular paying audience I saw it with wasn’t laughing, either. The comedy simply doesn’t work, least of all when the subject at hand is anything but light. And because the staging seems to chase laughs by any means necessary, you end up feeling sorry for Tom Cruise and a cast that bellows its lines at full volume, as if begging someone, anyone, to react. Something here clearly isn’t working.

If you can shake the feeling that you’re watching an empty comic gesture and take Digger for what it is at its core, a brutal post-apocalyptic drama, the film improves somewhat. It starts to play as a meta-commentary on an urgent subject, the threat of imminent environmental disaster. Seen this way it turns darker, thornier and more tangled, a confused but challenging look at a future that appears rough and uncomfortable from every angle. But getting there requires some work to figure out what Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film is, or rather what it might have been and what it ends up being.

Digger Rockwell is the name of an oil magnate played by Cruise, in the look audiences have already seen in the promotional stills and videos. A bombastic, conservative Texan, he seems to have even the president of the United States (John Goodman) under his thumb, an equally pompous figure who is dealing with some health problems of his own. Their paths cross when Digger learns that an accident at one of his Greenland oil wells has sent a colossal chunk of floating ice, the size of several American cities (the only way anyone here seems to grasp scale), breaking loose and racing toward Europe. Digger’s science adviser, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), believes it will hit Norway in three days, killing thousands and causing damages that can be counted in billions of dollars.

The eccentric Digger, who carries around a strange white cat that looks more dead than alive, gathers the entire cabinet at his home and persuades them that, when in doubt, the best course is to keep the public in the dark. In the meantime they toy with a few belligerent ideas, such as firing missiles at the ice, which Ganesh does not exactly recommend. While the top brass debates its next move, the first of the film’s twists arrives about half an hour in. It’s one I’m going to spoil, because I want to discuss what happens here in some depth. (Note: those who’d rather not know can stop reading now and pick things up again at the last two paragraphs.)

An accident on the stage where the action takes place reveals that what we’ve been watching is actually a theatrical production, the dress rehearsal of a play called Fossil Fools. Digger, it turns out, is an actor named Curtis Markson. In that role we get a Tom Cruise with a little less makeup and a little less shouting than his character, and we understand that the declamatory acting style we’ve seen so far was meant to be theatrical. (Note: it wasn’t a hidden musical, as many assumed from the trailer, but it wasn’t all that far off, either.) Behind the scenes, other characters come into view, among them the play’s producer, played by Jesse Plemons, and its director, played by Sophie Wilde, along with a fresh set of problems and some debate over the themes of the play itself. But Iñárritu quickly returns to the play, to watch things deteriorate further and further in that world of chaos.

The film’s thematic core arrives around the midpoint and relies on a staple of classic Hollywood cinema, the monologue before a vast audience. Here the magnate addresses the European Parliament and lectures its members on the role of oil in their societies, arguing that the fault lies not with him for extracting it but with everyone else for constantly wanting to consume it through its many derivative products. It’s an ambiguous, unsettling speech that tries to put the spotlight on our collective blindness to the environmental catastrophe wrought by large-scale extraction. The text itself is quite forceful, but given the tonal muddle the story has reached by then, it’s wasted, just a few more screams in an infernal racket that has probably worn out half the audience by this point. The same fate awaits the next twist, perhaps an even stronger one than the first. Its implications are serious, but by the time it arrives, almost nobody is likely to care.

(End of Spoilers)

Iñárritu doesn’t seem to want to leave the maximalism he has bet everything on and the allegorical weight he piles on crushes the good narrative ideas and the visual grandeur his films sometimes have. Unlike Bardo, which is more a cinematic ego trip than anything else, Digger at least takes on a subject of universal interest, one that shows a filmmaker whose relationship with the world extends beyond his own navel. Worry over the future of the planet and of humanity in the face of a possible, plausible environmental collapse is a hard subject to tackle in film without sounding preachy or accusatory. And you have to give the director of Babel credit for trying to find a way in, to give the subject an original twist within an aesthetic and a narrative logic that are distinctly his own. That he hasn’t fully pulled it off has to do, as I see it, with an artistic trap from which he no longer seems able, or willing, to escape.

As a «Tom Cruise movie,» Digger is a curious experience, perhaps the strangest of his entire career. His character is a blend of the fervent creatures he played in Tropic Thunder and Magnolia, while his look recalls a few of the many disguises his character wore in the Mission: Impossible films. Pulled out of his acting comfort zone, Cruise tries to keep from sinking under the weight of the surroundings and the contraption around him, but he doesn’t always stay afloat. A celebrated art director once said that if the set draws too much attention, the actors have to shout to be noticed. Here, Iñárritu puts that theory to the test, and the result is a failed experiment. An irritating cacophony whose constant noise ends up drowning out even the good ideas it has to offer.