MOVIE REVIEW: Digger
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
DIGGER— 3 STARS
A dilapidated and clearly animatronic cat is the first “living” thing we see in Digger, spending time with aging oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, played by Tom Cruise, finally putting franchises and legacy sequels behind him to play his age while cloaked in prosthetic makeup by The Whale and Maestro specialist Kazu Hiro. He sleeps with it, dotes on it with caviar, keeps a picture of it by the bedside, and, despite all that affection, the cat looks like it's on the last of its nine lives, putting up with this terrible person. Admittedly and by design, it doesn’t take long in Digger for us to be as miserable as the cat, listening to the rootin-tootin’ blowhard who exhibits every quality of the fragile male ego fitting a man with wealth and power passed to him by generational patriarchy. If you can endure that rancidness and even more rants, Digger has ambition it seeks to berate for our absorption.
LESSON #1: THE IGNORANT TREATMENT OF CLIMATE SCIENCE— At a palatial estate draped in exotic, excessive taxidermy, Digger has garnered the visiting audience of an ailing President Compson (John Goodman) and his staff as they try to navigate a growing ecological disaster at one of Rockwell’s drilling sites in Greenland, something Digger received warnings about for weeks. A growing fissure in a glacier leads to a methane explosion that calves an enormous iceberg that is moving east and south with the wind and ocean currents on a disastrous trajectory to make chain-reaction tsunami landfall in northern Europe. The squawking debate between Digger, the President’s people, and the categorically ignored scientific experts, led by Riz Ahmed’s Dr. Ganesh, is whether to warn the European nations, blow the thing up, or ignore it and deflect the blame away from the United States. Digger plants a very clear flag in its cinematic ground to call out the long-held industrial and political ignorance towards the growing crisis of climate change; an easy and worthy mark for farce.
LESSON #2: MEN WHO ONLY CARE ABOUT THE BOTTOM LINE AND THEIR OWN RETENTION OF POWER— If Digger Rockwell cared about anything as much as his stinking cat or the billions in his bank account, this crisis could have been completely averted, yet here these insecure, impatient, and powerful men waffle selfishly and disgustingly at being disappointed by preventable outcomes when things don’t go their way, thanks to a cavalcade of ignored “ifs, possibles, and coulds.” Watching this plotline in Digger unfold, you can tell there are no redeeming qualities to these so-called leaders and ‘Merica mutterers, and a “gen-oil-cyde” disaster is imminent.
Right when things are unraveling out of control, and character choices get exponentially worse, Alejandro González Iñárritu, unfurling a wild story idea that’s been gestating with him since 2015’s The Revenant and set as a planned collaboration with Cruise established in 2019, yanks Digger with a dramatic change of perspective that would make even M. Night Shyamalan’s head spin. Unlike that popular twist artist of The Sixth Sense and Signs, Iñárritu isn’t pulling back curtains for surprise’s sake. His daring transition means to thicken the entire plot by adding layer upon layer of additional meaning, expanded symbolism, and a kaleidoscope of tinted lenses warping and examining what he has scaffolded. The studio’s urgent request to not reveal key specifics stops this line of thought here.
True to the vitae of the Birdman Oscar winner, Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn’t leave an inch of his 35mm film unmanicured. Ace production designer Dennis Gassner (1917, Blade Runner 2049) provides deeply detailed set creations bathed in a plethora of dulled accoutrements that match the aforementioned symbolism of hubris and failure. Three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity) returns from a four-year break from films to deliver Iñárritu all of the widened views, measured blocking, and lingering movements to absorb the director’s penchant for developing massive monologue moments for his actors and executing long takes of performative and scenic choreography. The last alluring layer to all this oddity comes from baroque pop artist Cosmo Sheldrake composing his first film score, and an unnerving one at that.
LESSON #3: EXECUTING A SATIRE-WITHIN-A-SATIRE— What can be said, delicately compared to what transpires very, very bluntly, is that the breadth evolving in Digger becomes a satire-within-a-satire, which is one of the riskiest propositions a storyteller can attempt. Black comedy is already a tough sell and a thinly acquired taste. The best, or at least most brazen, satires purposely rub our noses in parallels to societal wrongs and ask viewers to laugh at them while casting their own judgments. Digger, with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s choices of layered implications that create a mystery as to the actual setting and time period in which all of this is taking place, invites the head-scratching question of whether one can make a satire and judge it at the same time, removing that latter participation step from the audience. Oh, the polarizing think pieces coming from this bleak and inky movie will fill volumes!
Likewise, does doubling the number of stumps and tenets in a film like Digger cloud the main message or multiply it? The script (with contributions from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s Jez Butterworth, Iñárritu’s Birdman partner, Nicolás Giacobone, and Gloria screenwriter Sabina Berman) is asking this esteemed ensemble to be comically flabbergasted at all times with little relief or counterargument. While those caricature traits grant some choice, profanity-laced diatribes and soapboxes for John Goodman and Tom Cruise’s deplorable monsters to sink their teeth into, one has to wonder if Digger is just a gaudy, self-congratulatory chance for these performers and artists to dress up and show off versus blowing a whistle and really drilling down to say something through their characters and theatrics.
Those results lie in the created arena of discourse and the execution of the intended satire from Alejandro González Iñárritu. Attempt to project all you want, but start at Digger’s surface layer of parody. Because the denial of climate change, the hot potato of blame, the reliance on fossil fuels, and the proven buffoonery of unqualified leaders in power prevalently exist, are we at the comfortable, or even appropriate, point to laugh at the irony? Could future generations look back and laugh as well at tragedy, or with an easier understanding cemented by the passage of time? Is a level of accuracy required? Because the strength and interpretation of the satire have been decided for you by the ambitious secret layers that come later, when are the big statements reduced to resigned wishes instead of pertinent calls for action? These lingering doubts and ponderances make Digger one of the most frightening and maddening films to process and embrace in recent memory.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1434)
