DIGGER Review: Tom Cruise Acts His Ass Off In Iñárritu's Latest Big Budget Experiment
Too far is not far enough in Academy Award-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s bombastic satire, Digger. Iñárritu guides an enthusiastic cast of Hollywood’s A-list through what is sure to wind up as one of the year’s loudest films. Tom Cruise leading the shout-y pack as the obstreperous oil baron, Digger Rockwell, a man whose greed may have doomed the world, but also possibly the only man who can save it.
The less said about the plot and structure of Digger, the better, even for those who will not like the film – and they will be legion – any joy that can be wrung from this boisterous, absurd experiment will be in the discovery. Suffice it to say that Digger Rockwell appears to be the most powerful man on Earth, and when one of his oil rigs kicks off a potentially cataclysmic chain of events, everyone who is anyone runs to him to find a way to save the world – or maybe just save face.
Among those in Digger’s orbit are President Compson (John Goodman), his chief science officer, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), his stubborn sister Emma (Sandra Hüller), and a rogue’s gallery of sycophants and yes-men. While each of these actors gets ample time to shine with exuberant, exasperated monologues, this is the Tom Cruise show, another desperate bid for an Academy Award, though they may have to morph the category from Best Actor to Most Actor in order to truly fit the bill here.
An idea almost a decade in the making, Iñárritu is firmly back in his Birdman mode with this latest effort, an abstruse mess of a film that is both too smart and too dumb for its own good. Ostensibly a satire about the billionaire class and the blinders they wear in order to further their own interests, Digger centers the discussion around climate change and the effect of human industry on this Earth that grows more fragile with each invasive incursion inflicted upon it in the name of profit.
Digger Rockwell is an amalgam of Elon Musk, Ross Perot, and every other egomaniacal nepo baby billionaire you can imagine, but with a dangerous level of charisma thanks to Cruise’s performance. We’ve seen this version of Cruise before, we saw it in Magnolia’s Frank T.J. Mackey, we saw it in the ego of Interview with the Vampire’s Lestat, but more than anything, we saw it in the cameo to end all cameos with Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman.
Iñárritu feeds Cruise’s beast with endless cacophonous monologues delivered on impeccably designed sound stages dripping with the kind of gilded gaudiness that would make Donald Trump envious. Each new venue provides a fresh opportunity for Cruise to primp and preen for his – or Rockwell’s – audience, and the volume at which this performance is delivered will either shred the viewer’s eardrums or draw them in, it’s an all or nothing game with Digger.
Not one to leave his supporting cast flapping in the wind, Iñárritu and his team of co-writers Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone also provide meaty opportunities for Goodman and Ahmed to shout at the audience. These diatribes occasionally even overpower an obviously amped up Cruise and beating him at his own game. Ahmed in particular gets one truly unhinged speech that may be more memorable than anything Cruise does in this film’s two-hour and ten-minute run time.
Though the film is titled Digger, it might as well be titled Bigger, as that word often feels like the only bit of direction Iñárritu gave to his cast and crew during the course of this shoot. Bigger sets, bigger performances, bigger risks, bigger rewards (maybe), bigger success or bigger disappointment, I feel like only time will tell with Digger.
All that being said, my overall opinion of Digger is positive, it’s not the gamechanger it seems to think it is, but it’s a wildly outré adventure for a big budget studio picture. Without getting into too many specifics, Iñárritu calls on the spirits of Jodorowsky and Terry Gilliam to craft this beautiful disaster of a film. Structurally, narratively, and visually labyrinthine, the film is constantly threatening to tip from satire into self-parody – and many will say it goes the full way, though I’m a bit more generous with my read.
The biggest problem with Digger is that for all of its audacity, it never believes in the intelligence of its audience to receive its message. Just as Cruise’s Digger Rockwell shouts every line of dialogue as if his life depends on it, the film feels the need to over explain its intentions and methods in an insultingly pedantic way that indicates Iñárritu doesn’t believe the viewer is smart enough to pick up what he is putting down.
There is no mystery, there is no space between the shouting for the audience to put pieces together for themselves, Digger simply yells its ideas at us, not unlike Keenan Ivory Wayan’s mailman in 1996’s Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood who pops into frame to shout, “Message!” every time the film parodies its overly earnest inspirations. If anything holds Digger back from an eventual evolution to a cult classic, it will be this distrust of its audience to discover the film’s ideas without being force-fed.
Digger is a hot mess of a movie, juggling too many ideas, too many philosophies, and too much shouting for any reasonable viewer to withstand. However, it’s that insistence that also makes me lean in to discover what obscenely irrational decision the film is going to make next, and more often that not, I was amused – though by a rather slim margin. There’s no doubt that Cruise is acting his ass off, but is more acting the same as better acting? Perhaps not, but it certainly is memorable, and maybe that is enough for me.
