Sometimes a movie feels so self-satisfied with its own righteousness, its own importance, and sense of profundity that it requests, nay, demands, that an audience stand and bask in the glory of its perverse and insightful observations. It lords over us, staring down the barrel of the movie screen at a nation of moviegoers, and insists that we laugh at its cheek, that we gasp at its audacity to speak truth to power, and weep at its insistence that art may be the only thing that will ultimately save us all. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” is just such a film, and it is exhausting. Heralded as the grand reemergence of Tom Cruise as a serious dramatic actor after over twenty years spent as the only true movie star in a class of performers that has largely gone extinct, the film barrels into theaters with the subtlety of a nuclear meltdown and the comedic sensibility of an oil spill; a billionaire’s circus of the bizarre screaming that its socio-political intentions are pure and its garish, screeching brand of humor is worthy of academic consideration. This is a film made by those for whom the rarefied air of high-minded intellectualism has turned noxious, who deem themselves the voice of the voiceless while having forgotten the common tongue with which the rest of us speak. “Digger” is a film that has a lot on its mind, and most of it is true. The world that we exist within is ridiculous, cartoonishly evil, and slowly corroding in real time. It is a society built upon greed, buffoonery, and mutually assured desecration, with socialist dreams warped in real time in favor of capitalistic convenience. The film believes that we need someone to point this out for us. But the truth is, we need no reminding. We DO CARE that our children will inherit a world far worse off than our own, that our leaders are theocratic morons who are dying before our very eyes, and that the engine of existence is powered by a depleting resource that is poisoning us today with the decayed organic matter of the long-ago past. We know that we are screwed, that the future is a pipe dream we ride the high of together. “Digger” screams these things to us, things we all agree with, and hopes that it can help us laugh as we sink into the crude black oblivion of our own negligence. But while our increasingly tragic reality can often be hilarious, “Digger”, sadly, is not.
“Digger” has a multi-layered narrative barely hinted at in the marketing, but for the purpose of a synopsis, the main story follows Cruise’s hee-haw oil baron, Digger Rockwell. Aging amid the garish opulence of generational privilege, Digger sees himself as providing the lifeblood of existence: an enriching, yet essential, cog in the fabric of sentience in its myriad forms. The universe is at his beck and call, with an army of servants, assistants, doctors, and scientists that leap at his prodding. Even the President of the United States (John Goodman) and the entirety of his Cabinet come to Digger in times of crisis. At the film’s opening moments, the only thing that Digger seems unable to control is the death of his long-suffering cat, who is clearly alive against its own wishes. Soon, the bubbling comeuppance of Digger’s ravaging of the natural world goes supernova when a methane explosion from one of his pipelines in the Arctic breaks off an iceberg six times the size of Washington, D.C. This gargantuan shelf of prehistoric ice, nicknamed “Judy”, begins a collision course for Europe, intending to flood half the continent. Calling on the full might of the United States government, who are on his speed dial if not his payroll, Digger sets about not only controlling the narrative but steering it to his own advantage, as he means to delay, or at least profit from, the inevitable destruction of Western society.
Cruise and Iñárritu are telling a high-minded story with good intentions, yet they seem to forget that the key to great art is in its ability to relate to an audience; to meet us halfway and give us something that we didn’t walk into the theater already in possession of. It’s not surprising that Cruise has trouble relating, because he is as alien to you and me as a Martian is to a dolphin. He isn’t like us, and yet we find him endlessly captivating as a performer. His superpower has always been his ability to offer only part of himself to sift through the pores of a performance, to embody his values while tamping down the inherent incongruity of his societal standing as one of the most famous popular entertainers alive who just so happens to help lead a cult. Cruise is a baffling creature, an infinitely more fascinating and conflicting figure than the title character he portrays, one actually worthy of a satirical dissection on the widest screen possible. It’s easy to cheer his willingness to be bisected again by an auteur filmmaker. It has been far too long since he was willing clay for Paul Thomas Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and even Rob Reiner to mold, challenge, and reshape into something exciting and new. Iñárritu, despite his Academy accolades, does not possess the skills to properly biopsy Cruise in 2026, or perhaps Cruise has no interest in displaying his fleshy bits for a movie-going audience that he stumps for as if having elected himself Union Leader for the world. “Digger” was meant to be a coming home for him, the crowning of a complicated career where Cruise could finally collect the flowers he has been planting diligently over the course of a lifetime. Yet, despite his best efforts, it’s hard to not sense Cruise drifting further and further away from us on a berg of his own manifestation; Hollywood’s last lone hero unable to leave the star persona behind and simply be human with us as he once did.
There is an idea buried deep in the runtime of “Digger”, one that I will not spoil here, that is legitimately interesting, a pulse-quickening jolt that threatened to reanimate the calcifying heart of a film that aspires to and yet falls far short of the gold standard set by “Strangelove”. Is the film a satire? Is it farce? Are we meant to engage with its story honestly or intellectually? Who cares if it isn’t funny; Kubrick understood that at the very least. Even “Megalopolis” dared to embrace the absurdity of an aging genius finally allowed to vomit his subconscious into the minds of moviegoers. “Digger,” in contrast, wants to have its cake and feed it to you too; to float above irony, to get ahead of any criticisms of its storytelling by pointing a finger at the audience and shaming them for not laughing at its self-styled and “biting” satire. In doing so, by not trusting in its own reason for existing, “Digger” reveals its new clothes to be nothing but the wrinkly remains of a near-dead autocrat holding onto a rusted shovel as a talisman of truth that becomes the implement of its own interment. There’s no coming back once you’ve insulted the intelligence of your audience; no amount of digging can ever get you out of that hole. Best just to lie there and accept the sweet release of death. The world has moved on and is surely all the better for it.
“Digger”, much like similar films that ring the panic bell of the incoming climate crisis, like “Don’t Look Up”, is a well-intentioned turd left putrefying on the marble floor of a grand palace; perhaps worthy of artistic interpretation if not for the small sign left beside it that points and screams that THIS IS IMPORTANT! We do not need those who can afford tickets on the inevitable Space Ark off our dying planet to preach the new gospel of our impending apocalypse. While there may be little to be done to mitigate what is to come, at the very least there is humor to be found in our collective commiseration, defiance in the face of oblivion. Perhaps “Digger” is right: our salvation will be found in art, if we are willing to dig deep enough to excavate it. If only it could embody the very ideals it espouses, maybe we would have had something here.
Dig deeper.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Digger” is playing at Prytania Uptown, Prytania at Canal Place, and The Broad Theater.
