Digger Review: Tom Cruise Can’t Save Iñárritu’s Climate Satire
An ambitious blend of doomsday dread, political satire, and absurdist comedy becomes a frustrating intellectual exercise.
Alejandro Iñárritu’s rambling satire Digger is a woolly mess of a film, though admirable in its ambition. Few modern movies aiming to reheat Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove recipe of doomsday dread, political satire, and broad absurdist comedy come as close to the Kubrickian ideal as Digger does in fits and starts.
Digger likewise plants us beside the President of the United States (John Goodman) and members of his cabinet cartoonishly fighting in the war room over what to do to avert an imminent disaster. Here, the threat’s not an atomic bomb, but rather an American-made climate catastrophe that could wipe out thousands, maybe millions of lives.
Under these grave circumstances, the movie’s funnier moments are generally with the President and his toadies debating disaster responses, most of which are ridiculous, or worse than the crisis they’re trying to prevent. Goodman goes big as the blustery Commander in Chief, rarely offering smart or sage strategy, but always fiercely in charge.
The man at the center of the chaos, though, is all-powerful Texas oil man Digger Rockwell, played by Tom Cruise, the center of the chaos that is this movie. Aged and bulked up with makeup and prosthetics, Cruise burrows as physically deep into character as any role he’s portrayed since (or before) his celebrated turn as portly prick of an agent Les Grossman in the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder.
Giddily uncaged from Cruise-ness, Tom acts with abandon, free to make Rockwell brash and mean and comically uncaring despite the fact that his company is responsible for this disaster. The drilling activities at one of his rigs in Greenland opened a crack in a glacier that could result in an ice shelf the size of a city breaking off into the sea and barreling towards northern Europe.
Initially, Rockwell ignores the stark warnings of his company’s Environmental Security scientists, setting up another good joke about just how immediate these dangers can be. Like climate crisis skeptics in the real world, Rockwell can deny mankind’s ill effects on the environment all he wants, but that won’t stop glaciers from calving massive flood- and avalanche-causing sheets of ice, sooner than later.
Written by Iñárritu with Sabina Berman and his fellow Oscar-winning Birdman scribes Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone, the film makes a strong case for not letting billionaire businessmen flagrantly exploit and defile the world’s natural resources for their sole financial gain.
Had the film pursued that case to some congruous end, Digger coulda been a contender. Instead, just when the over-the-top performances, doomsday scenario, and Rockwell’s poor, dilapidated cat Maggie have us invested, Iñárritu flips the script and format egregiously. It’s not the movie’s message that falls apart, just the plot.
The rug pull could open up unexpected layers of story, but instead undermines our emotional investment in all that’s gone before. A fun movie becomes an intellectual exercise.
Tension drains from the proceedings, along with sense, exposing the try-hard jokiness and self-conscious strangeness — both accentuated by the striking low-angle and extreme close-up images crafted by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (another Iñárritu collaborator who’s been graced by the Academy).
Kubrick might be the inspiration, but it appears Yorgos Lanthimos was on the vision board. Lanthimos’ Bugonia leading man Jesse Plemons pops up here, repeatedly, as Kenny, a mysterious side character of no discernible purpose. Sandra Hüller, as Rockwell’s venomous half-sister and business partner, is similarly saddled with a high-profile character who doesn’t stir the story much.
Riz Ahmed, enjoyably alarmed as environmental scientist Ganesh, plays a more pivotal role. Fighting the unwinnable fight to get through to two mad despots — Rockwell and the President — Ganesh is often the dismayed voice of reason drowned out by the noise, a fitting metaphor for Ahmed’s relatively grounded part in this flighty ramshackle parable.
Digger (★★☆☆☆) is rated R, and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
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