DIGGER
A Sneaky Satire That Doesn't Dig Deep Enough
From the indulgently ambitious mind of Alejandro González Iñárritu, writer, director of Birdman (2014), The Revenant (2015), and Bardo (2022), comes a cartoonish Dr Strangelove esc climate farce, where Tom Cruise plays a wild Texan oil tycoon who has unleashed an ecological disaster upon the world, or so you may think?
The film opens in the excessively predatory mansion of Digger Rockwell (Cruise), who wakes up in his silk pyjamas to nurse his decomposing white cat Maggie, all the while Digger’s oil company is drilling in the middle of Greenland with threat of methane exposure. Digger's arrogant ignorance to keep on drilling ultimately leads to a mass explosion splitting off an iceberg the size of Maryland in the direction of Europe causing an impending tsunami. The rubbery faced loudmouth President played by John Goodman assembles an emergency meeting at Digger's house with a parade of outlandish male generals and advisors with Riz Armed's nervously honest Dr. Nirav Ganesh delivering the scale of the bad news. Digger has a knack for twisting narratives and proposes the manipulation of public awareness in their favour, while simply nuking the iceberg is also suggested by the rock-hard military who are keen use a many mass weapons as they can to solve the problem. From this point onwards it’s hard to describe the rest of Digger without giving away the radical change in direction the film takes, but it is not really that hard to guess.
Following other smart-arse suite from works such as: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (2023), and I was also reminded of Joshua Oppenheimer's The End (2024) which took another unconventional swing in apocalyptic self-delusion, Digger unmasks a big-headed guise beyond its initial climate crisis comedy to something more meta and undoubtably self-indulgent. Once the bubble is burst you can roll your eyes at it or roll with it, but either way the issue remains that it regards what you have been watching up to this point as utterly meaningless.
Iñárritu gets to his comfortably postmodernist form, and while it can be frustrating to say the least, it comes very sparingly which leaves the rest of the film to feel like awkward vignettes from a Roy Andersson film. As the world of Digger evolves, so does the extravagant production design that widens to the egotistical width of the film’s ideas. Once the line has been crossed, Digger can't really figure out what to do with itself or whether it really has anything to say, apart from as one longwinded elaborate joke. It's like Iñárritu got bored with the Strangelove film he was making and decided to revisit Birdman instead.
The timely idea of incompetent government and greedy businessmen actively initiating the end of the world is nothing new or that fictional from where we are now as a society, therefore Iñárritu's dramatic left turn from its concept is an admirably risky one that poses a wider question about the value of satire itself. Is satire meant to simply entertain or prosecute those it targets? Will we still be able to laugh at ourselves even after the world has ended? Or is there any point to it at all? By the time the curtain has fallen it’s already too late to do anything about it. These questions have the spark of a film with a fresh-faced approach, but the film doesn’t even run that far with it and tediously returns to its pre-established premise that has completely lost its stakes.
Cruise gets to have a lot of fun with this role, which includes a toxically confrontational monologue Digger must make where he berates the world of pale faced extras for their complicity in his destructive actions. It's probably the film's strongest scene that utilises Emmanuel Lubezki's free flowing camerawork to its most dramatic degree, but Digger Rockwell just isn’t enough of a compelling character for Cruise to truly bring to life. It’s the added disadvantage of the film’s nature to downgrade Digger as a significant personality, and while we are meant to see Cruise's performance through multiple layers, it comes across as just vapid and feeble for its own existence. It's Riz Armed who has the standout performance with a rising anxiety over the lies and deceit that Digger plays, only to just give over to the stupidity of it all in a drunken daze. Sandra Huller has a disappointingly underserved role as Digger's sister Emma who never adds any flair or sophistication, as does a similarly underused Michael Stuhlbarg.
For whatever curve balls Digger throws at you, the question remains is whether it is funny? There is something undeniably amusing about watching screen giant Tom Cruise play such an over-the-top Stetson wearing looney under such heavy grey-haired prosthetics, and his shared maniacal energy with Goodman make for some laughs, but not nearly enough. Most of the gags run the length of a dry overdrawn-out SNL sketch, and when it does work is only when it is just replicating Strangelove.
There is an unavoidable rug pulled out in Digger that changes everything about the narrative, characters, and meaning, ultimately diminishing it of any grandeur impact it was attempting to conjure. Within that rug are the seeds of an interesting idea that the film leaves as a fleeting final note, while it concentrates on a story it’s not really interested in telling.
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