The pursuit of great ambition, when achievement doesn’t follow, can come at a cost of its own. Such is the case with Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s highly anticipated partnership with a reinvented Tom Cruise in their high-minded misadventure, Digger, a challenging movie to review given its secret narrative agenda, and one whose sky-high reach exceeds its grasp.
It’s the kind of film where you think it’s about one thing, only to discover that it’s about something else entirely. Hitchcock did this famously and often, never better than in Psycho, when the story of Janet Leigh’s petty thief on the run was merely a prelude to one of the most diabolical psychosexual thrillers of all time. But this isn’t Hitchcock, and the problem for Iñárritu is that the first section of his film is the strongest; the rest is frustratingly uneven and unsatisfying.
Having now seen it, the film has been marketed in truly the most obscured fashion, mostly relying on Cruise’s physical immersion—as if that alone were enough to sell tickets—in what appeared to be a Kubrickian satire about the end of the world at the hands of a megalomaniac gone to seed. And with great imagination, gusto and rich detail, Cruise plays that tycoon, one “Digger” Rockwell, an oil baron whose unregulated Greenland drilling has set an iceberg on course for Europe with tsunami force.
But the ad campaign really couldn’t have been any other way, as this is the most decidedly uncommercial studio movie in, well, forever—and Warner Bros., whom you almost feel badly for, clearly didn’t keep tabs on its (lack of) commercial prospects. Not that I’m advocating for commerce over art, and Iñárritu has clearly and admirably attempted the latter. It’s just that his admittedly visionary experiment does not hang together.
The first half hour, which really isn’t much of a 129-minute movie, is a slam-bang broad satire that feels like a mash-up of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam with a side of Wes Anderson; it’s also deeply funny. Digger opens with Cruise’s titular magnate waking up in bed with his death’s-door cat, with whom he’s had a decades-long relationship and somehow managed to keep alive, and just that setup is filled with extravagant design. The grandiose mansion set is an eyeful—a gargantuan, baroque, overstuffed domicile filled with taxidermy, a fab dual-antler mirror to infinity and every shade of brown in existence, part hunting lodge and part billionaire bunker, a sort of Foxcatcher-esque estate fit for a mad king.
So far, so good. But after a furious video call with his drilling operation team in Greenland and a dire warning about a crack in the ice shelf caused by his operation, dismissive Digger is blindsided by the news that the ice shelf has broken off, his team has perished and the iceberg (nicknamed “Judy”) is set to topple Norway. The outlook is gloom and doom, at least according to his scientist/advisor Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, enjoyable). Liability! In storms U.S. President Compson, played by John Goodman, bellowing in a tremendous comedy turn that deserves supporting actor consideration at year’s end; he’s so funny he even turns a joke about cancer—yes—into high physical comedy.
Goodman’s Compson is quite a creation, a writ-large caricature of a right-wing, America-first czar-in-chief, unconcerned with environmental meddling and catastrophe, and mostly concerned with how to sell the narrative to the American people. Got it. Did I mention it’s a broad satire? This is very funny business, and the movie’s obvious press on fervent nationalism reaches an apex in a masterfully staged scene in which Compson and his cabinet of yes-men hash out a plan—all yelling, screaming, praying and then absurdly considering U.S. military firepower (what else?) as a solution. Compson and Digger belong to the same breed, men accustomed to getting their way through money, power and force. On the other hand, Sandra Hüller, as Digger’s beleaguered half-sister and business partner, is inexplicably underused.
But then the film takes a hard left turn about 35 minutes in, forcing a re-evaluation of everything we have seen and fundamentally (and near-fatally) changing the film’s calculus. Suddenly, we are no longer fully engaged in that sharp satire, and the movie becomes almost all about one thing—Tom Cruise and what he’s doing with the role. Even when the satire returns, and it does for the majority of the movie, the film’s new thesis has sucked the life and stakes out of it. The film’s 90-plus remaining minutes after the revelation of its actual agenda give us little to invest in. There’s not much “there” there.
Confused yet? Well, to see Digger is to have my cryptic descriptions made clear, but you may still end up confused as to how so many talented people did not see that the screenplay, by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone, had these structural issues, despite some very good stuff along the way, especially Cruise’s oratory fireworks in an impressive, ten-minute monologue “argument” to a courtroom audience in which Digger defends himself and his worldview, performed in one take with 12 pages of dialogue and as impressive as any of his celebrated onscreen action stunts. In individual moments such as this, where Digger tries to convince the world (and himself, maybe) that he’s a savior rather than an architect of our doom, the movie springs back to life.
The always welcome Jesse Plemons is also along for the ride, but the less said about his character the better. Suffice to say that the actor is again in top form, and in a key late-film monologue about art, life and the audience, he nails an intriguing idea that the movie seems to be getting at: when reality becomes increasingly absurd, even tragic, art and life will bleed together for audience consumption, an assertion that sets the stage for a brilliant, extended final shot.
Iñárritu, who twice won the directing Oscar for Birdman and The Revenant, has but once across a great career (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) miscalculated, in 2022’s indulgent, empty Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. Digger isn’t empty, but Iñárritu does ultimately lose the plot. What does work, however, is the consistently breathtaking cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, deploying an ashen-gray sheen to his full VistaVision lensing, certain to be eye-popping in IMAX. Even when the story falters, the movie remains a visual knockout.
The real frustration of Digger is that there is so much talent, money (to the tune of $180 million budget) and ambition here, and yet so little of it ultimately adds up to anything. Iñárritu reaches big on themes of power, catastrophe, art and life, but the film can’t quite hold all of those things together. There are strong moments, and Cruise gives it everything he has. But even the best individual pieces can’t make the whole thing work.
And that’s a shame, because the opening has energy, it’s funny, it looks fantastic and for a while it feels like Iñárritu is completely in control of the strange movie he’s making. But after Digger reveals what it’s really about, the more it explains itself, the less compelling it becomes. For all its spectacle, Digger goes big in every direction except where it counts.
2 stars
