Review: Digger

Spoilers for Digger below.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a talented filmmaker. He makes complex, technically dazzling movies, but he’s also a little annoying. Dedicated to weaving a multitude of threads since Amores Perros, he seems to find it difficult to keep things contained and stop himself falling into grandiosity.

There have been hits (Ale, The Revenant! I liked it!) and misses (Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) and all of them are, at the very least, visually impressive works. It would be fair to say that the one thing they tend to lack, however, is a sense of fun. Which is why I am glad to report that his latest, the peculiar Digger, is packed with silliness, and most importantly, this one knows it.

Although it is a comedy, it is about nothing less than the fate of the planet, and its self-inflicted climate catastrophe – this is a González Iñárritu joint after all.

We meet Digger Rockwell in bed at his ostentatious, carcass-festooned mansion. From the initial exterior shots we feel that something is off. Trees look flat, landscapes are made of matte paint. No time to dwell on that yet as we are introduced to the only thing Digger seems to appreciate living – his piss-soaked ancient cat, Maggie. It’s a puppet with just enough artifice for us to already be asking: are we supposed to think that this is real?

Digger Rockwell, if you hadn’t guessed from the name, is a Texan oil baron. Derrick Slick must have been taken. This is Tom Cruise’s much anticipated return to proper character acting – really, to any acting outside the franchise machine – in nine years. It’s been such a stretch that it’s easy to forget that there was once another Tom Cruise, a capital A actor Tom Cruise, one who didn’t cling onto the side of planes, cheeks rattling in the wind, as he told us he’d see us at the movies with the vaguely threatening aura of a man who has given his entire life to this stuff. This is Mr. Movies. Were we going to let Mr. Movies down? Mr. Movies knows where we live. And he can fly now.

But let him down we have, if ticket sales don’t magically surge overnight. Digger is currently on track to be one of his worst ever showings at the box office, and for all intents and purposes seems to signify a watershed moment for the sixty-four year old’s star power. But does it really?

We have to go back to 1999 to see when the then thirty-seven year old last went truly out on a limb with a character (Les Grossman and Axl Rose impression not counting), in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, narrative web Magnolia. It is, for my money, Cruise’s best performance to date. An honest and unguarded depiction of a deeply misogynistic proto-Tate influencer that was very much not in his safety zone. After marketing and distribution costs, the film almost certainly did not recoup its money, despite its critical acclaim.

Digger is not Magnolia. But it is Tom Cruise’s second best performance, and his most daring, so it might just be that he has spent so long crafting expectations of a Tom Cruise movie – increasingly convoluted ways he might actually die – that when it doesn't walk like one, quack like one, the audience shrugs.

Count that performances, plural. About twenty minutes into the film, we are shaken awake to the reality that everything we have been watching so far has actually been an elaborate stage rehearsal of a satirical play in the near dystopian future. Digger Rockwell is a character, based on an in-universe real bastard, and Curtis Markson (also Cruise) is the actor playing him under pudgy body prosthetics. It was at this point in the cinema a man sitting behind me muttered to his partner of the revelation, “my head’s fallen off”. It is quite the rug pull and could easily lead to an irreversible disaster, the cinematic equivalent of a rogue ice shelf calving. But it never really does. Iñárritu justifies the breakneck curtain-raising with a bombastic, if muddy, climate catastrophe satire that steadily delivers on laughs as much as po-faced sermons to camera. Dr. Strangelove it is not, but what could be?

This is a movie about a play-within-a-movie, Fossil Fools, and not the first time Iñárritu has used the world of theatre as a backdrop before, as he did in 2014’s Birdman. The problem I tend to run into with some of Iñárritu’s work is that he strives for an odd mix of realism and fanciful plotting. It ironically feels artificial, and so here Digger works. He has created a tale befitting of his tendencies, to service it rather than hinder it. Its theatricality means that his excesses no longer break the reality of the movie because the artificiality is the reality of the movie.

When we are dropped back into the play-within-the-film, the sets are so vivid, the choreography so dizzying, the performances so dialled to eleven that it is easy to put the conceit aside and get reabsorbed into it. Cruise and John Goodman in particular as (the actor playing) the ailing, bible-bashing President are given several bravura moments to remind the world why they were and are movie stars. It’s particularly gratifying to see Goodman bite into a role with such gusto again after a fairly fallow late period.

Birdman used Michael Keaton in a Kaufmanesque manner to have a man famous to most as Batman playing an actor trying to get out of the shadow of his fictional analogue. When Cruise is performing here as Curtis, the actor behind Digger, he is also being utilised in a similarly metatextual way, and it's here when his performance truly sings. It is a rarity nowadays to see Tom Cruise play small, vulnerable. Curtis struggles with the larger-than-life performance he has been giving as Digger. He examines the value of the work he has devoted himself to. He worries about his missing daughter. He questions the nature of what this whole enterprise is about – is art capable of saving the world? Not really, according to Iñárritu, but it depends on your perspective.

By the time of the play, the catastrophe has long since happened, and Fossil Fools has been a decades-old stage adaptation of the real world events caused by Digger and his cohort of dick-swinging capitalist power players. What the play can and does offer to the decaying outside world is a little levity, a bit of catharsis before they have to strap their gas masks back on and head out into the smog. Art isn’t saving the world here but it is helping it grieve.

There are going to be many that won’t dig Digger, but as a bold experiment in the next chapter of Mr. Movies, I am glad it exists. I’ll see him at the movies.