Tom Cruise may dance away from the wreckage with an Oscar. (Digger/Warner Bros)
There is something so exhilarating and disturbing about Digger that some people may elect to dismiss it as chaos, or out of control, and a woeful mishandling of our dear Tom Cruise. You see, this is not so much a movie as a crazed event. It is a mess, too long and too packed with nightmare detail. Yet the finesse of critical distinctions hardly matters here. Digger is not just a wild, flawed masterpiece, but a movie that shouts at us: “What else do you idiots expect from this ruined age?”
So don’t count on a judicious balancing of what is right here and wrong there. Just settle for the bleak, ecstatic estimate Digger has of itself: that it deserves to be seen and judged as a fitting celebration of the nihilist frivolity of our last days.
Digger isn’t just a final story; it’s the explosive closure on history. If it is a masterpiece, then it abandons and scatters the ideal that such lofty models exist to nourish us. Instead it indicates that movies and empires are nothing more than leaves of used toilet paper — the consequence of cancer of the asshole. (That remark isn’t just gratuitous rhetoric; it’s a plot point in the picture, and I won’t spoil it any further.)
It’s proper to say that as the film begins a plain and vulgar doofus of infinite wealth and power wakes up in an antique and palatial bedroom to discover that his wretched and inert white cat has used the bed it and the man share as a latrine. As well as that embarrassment, the ending of the world has begun.
The man is Digger, the most profound oil tycoon in forever. He is “Digger” because in the past his family pioneers dug for oil as the world’s elemental energizer and elixir (it was a currency like “happiness” or “the American idea”). He keeps the original shovel mounted on the wall, as a piece of the true cross. But now his sophisticated information systems report that due to his exploiting the resources of Greenland, immense portions of the icecap have been set loose in the ocean and… well, to serve it neat, on the rocks, the world is lucidly doomed.
I say “lucidly” because everyone, and every climate denier, knows, and has always known, how this finale was going to work: surpassing what any disaster movie has ever shown. The deadly deal is sketched in very fast, with ocean streams going into reverse, the permafrost and the methane, the billions of casualties to a point of extinction. And climate deniers long ago consented to this scenario: they have been purchasing and fortifying the high ground, with private energy, pantries of caviar and cheesecake, all the Matisses they can obtain, armories of guns, and the self-satisfaction that will allow them to have as good an end of time as possible. Because “survival” is just a pretentious PR word for getting yours while you can. And fuck the rest of them (formerly known as us).
Digger knows this situation is ripe for farce — or the kind of half-baked crisis the old Ethan Hunt had a knack of solving. But hasn’t every attempt at sensible warning, scientific explanation and knick-of-time rescue been exhausted and put in aspic? Why kid ourselves that we’ve ever been serious about being serious? Just relish how this merry doomsday doesn’t even mention AI — the filmmakers likely reckoned they were being hip enough and on the money by referring to Greenland.
So the film’s end game is played out by Digger and a haggard POTUS scrambling not to save Earth but simply to handle the story. This is a breakthrough event (our cultural icepack is cracking): not just a disaster movie but the demonstration that we can only treat our catastrophe as a show and as entertainment.
Digger will be regarded as the vision and the enterprise of Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu, working from a story idea that he came up with alongside Sabina Berman and Jez Butterworth. There are impressive credentials in these names. Iñárritu made Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), among others. He has been working away at “survival” for a long time. Berman is a journalist, playwright and novelist. Butterworth is a versatile screenwriter, whose works range from The Birthday Girl (2001) to forays with James Bond and Indiana Jones, and the play Jerusalem.
Judged simply from a writer’s point of view, Digger, the finished film of 129 minutes and $125 million, is a striking yet shallow fable, and rather hit and miss. Not all the jokes land well, and we have an array of supporting characters (including John Goodman as POTUS, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, and Michael Stuhlbarg) who are introduced but not adequately explored — as if the film doesn’t have the time or the energy to really get into them. As if it doesn’t have that much faith in people.
That is an observation more than a complaint, but it cannot hide the fact that this is a Tom Cruise vehicle. The cries of distress, betrayal and confusion over the movie (and I suspect they will be noisy) will spring from the way Cruise is presented. This is an aspect of the actor as vivid and detailed as an eccentric from Dickens but shocking if you have loved the old Tom Cruise. This is as bold, crazy and unthinkable as casting Jimmy Stewart to be Norman Bates. But for much good and some incidental ill, Tom is the auteur of this movie.
So don’t go away thinking he has been tricked or traduced in this wipe-out mission. It’s more significant that Cruise is on camera nearly the whole time, and that his production company had been central in setting up the film. Indeed, it’s absurd to think that this wayward and eccentric venture would ever have had its green light without Tom.
One explanation is that Tom, at 64, is eager for a shot at an Oscar and some decent respect for his acting. He will have heard the lamentation over many years at how the actor who was flat-out brilliant and merciless with his sexual fascist in Magnolia (1999) — playing a prophet of male dominance and then going into emotional breakdown — has evaded his own potential with that eternal fantasy twerp Ethan Hunt who has never seen a cliff he wouldn’t jump off or a face-cracking grin he couldn’t hold together.
Cruise has sometimes had it in him to be an actor instead of a brazen personality. Apart from Magnolia, he has been very good in Rain Man (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996) and Collateral (2004), but he always sinks back into the monotony of routine pictures celebrating prowess. Most of these have been very successful and helped build his daft persona as a mini-man, a dynamo, edging closer to a kind of frenzied mastery. Yet he also comes across as someone who lacks the willingness to grow older, let alone more mature. This can hardly come easily (unless he is truly something other than humdrum human). Amid the real life allowed by Scientology, he has had a storyline of failed relationships and the glee of jumping on Oprah’s sofa. As much as Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, Tom is endearing because he seems so radiantly alien.
His Digger does not look like Tom Cruise. He is paunchy, balding, meandering and maniacally casual. He is also hysterically emphatic and self-repetitive. As in much of his work, Cruise feels plugged into a secret power source. (You can see what Scientology digs in him.) It’s as if the idiotic has become axiomatic. There is no suggestion of Tom imitating or being influenced by Donald Trump, but Digger gets that big man’s imbecilic authority and his hunch that power proves itself by doing whatever it wants. The result is so startling Cruise may dance away from the wreckage with an Oscar, just because so many actors will feel inspired by his tribute to unrestrained and shameless impulse.
Yet his frantic command restricts the potential of this film. If Cruise felt more nuanced, or was more open to doubt, there might be a sunset glow of tragedy around his stupid power-broker. Digger’s few close ties might come to life as black holes of failure. But Tom is so terrified of being boring he cannot stoop to stillness or quiet. On screen all the time, he becomes an oppressor to the film’s comedy. In so many earlier satires on America (like the films by Frank Capra in the Thirties, like Citizen Kane or the Godfather films), disaster was averted and masked by some sprightly adventure or an ironic trust in good will and staying as cheery as Ethan Hunt or as calm as Michael Corleone. That relief does not exist in Digger. And so the film reaches a giddy summit, where it admits the futility of our hope for the future, and then exults in it. This leads to an airy and fascinating conceit, involving the most appealing figure in the film (played by Jesse Plemons). But that waits for you to find it.
Does this seem more or less than a “masterpiece”? To grasp that, we need to study the best things in Digger. There are at least three people who deserve great credit. They were all hired by Iñárritu, and they are collaborators in his surrealist vision. From the outset, we see Digger’s mansion filled with decrepit antiques in a dead light. A look of gray ice pervades the movie; primary colors have been eliminated; the attempts at “design” are fatuous. There is no human touch any longer. And in some crowd scenes, the seething mass of humanoids includes mannequins and models. Some of us are dead or unalive already. This comes from the production design of Dennis Gassner (assisted by Richard Johnson), from the drab-gaudy costumes of Jacqueline West, and the drained photography of Emmanuel Lubezki. These are more than conventional craft contributions.
The uniqueness of Digger — though it has some inheritance from The Truman Show (1998), a film Gassner designed, and from Poor Things (2023) — is beyond reality and seeming “beautiful”. It knows the pompous shabbiness that is being introduced these days in Washington and Florida, the tasteless splendor of the death wish. The bogus arch, the dead pool, the Cinderella ballroom, and the sighs of religiosity as he talks to his mad mirror. It’s more alarming than any amount of body-snatching or flesh-eating. This is the first film I can think of that could be the last great film we may see.