You have to admire actors who take risks. Who play against type. Who defy their screen personas. In the new film from Mexican producer-director-writer Alejandro González Inárritu, Tom Cruise sheds the mantle of Ethan Hunt, the protagonist of the Mission: Impossible franchise and Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell of Top Gun fame. The death-defying stunts are gone, replaced by prosthetics and melodramatics.
Everything about Digger is artful, yet virtually none of its story is subtle. It’s virtuosic, intentional moviemaking. It’s seriously “meta,” yet obvious, cluttered and constrained by its own cleverness.
Cruise portrays the title character, Digger Rockwell, a fabulously wealthy, eccentric and influential tycoon whose unrestrained oil drilling operations bode ill for humanity’s future. (He adores “Maggie” and unleashes “Judy.”) John Goodman, now in the midst of a late career renaissance, plays President Compson, a blustering, delusional cipher of a political leader beholden to Big Business and governed by a Big Temper. Michael Stuhlbarg assumes the role of the ineffectual Vice President, with Sandra Hüller as Emma Rockwell, Digger’s half-sister and the altruistic proprietor of an environmental mitigation firm. Riz Ahmed is the idealistic climate scientist and adviser Ganesh, and Jesse Plemons is Kenny, the nephew closely related to the Big Reveal.
Inárritu and his collaborators lean heavily into black humor and satire. Fair enough, but Digger’s message–a very serious message–gets lost in all of the bombast. Put another way, the screenplay calls for too many decibels and not enough notes.
The actors, especially Cruise and Goodman, certainly have their moments, and they clearly relish them. When Digger, standing in the well of a room suggestive of an ancient Roman senate, bellows about “freedom” and “hypocrisy” to a group of self-righteous international leaders, you’ll recognize the formula for an Oscar Moment. Rhetorically and visually, it’s really quite spectacular. Inárritu shoots Digger from a low angle, emphasizing his girth, as well as his spit and vinegar. The camera swirls around the space and bores in on the attendees. Pity the "Fossil Fools.”
Likewise, Goodman’s president, hampered by age, physical ailments and bad political options, gets his own set-piece opportunity to chew the scenery. The combination of his contorted features and intense closeups may test your sense of humor, or at least make you wonder when caricature defeats character.
Inárritu has an admirable record as a filmmaker. His debut feature, Amores perros (2000), is a visceral, psychologically rich study in hyperlink cinema, with its multiple overlapping story lines. He later claimed back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Director for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). In Digger, he pays homage to a wealth of other directors and pictures.
The existential conflict of many of the characters here harkens back to John Cassavetes’ 1977 classic Opening Night. (Inárritu has stated as much.) Digger also evokes memories of Stanley Kubrick’s ferociously over-the-top satire Dr. Strangelove (1964); Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), with its blend of operatic and cinematic storytelling; and, perhaps above all, Federico Fellini’s masterpieces, 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973), with their layered narratives and deliberately artificial sets.
Aside from watching for those references, the greatest strength of Digger lies in its direction, cinematography (by Emmanuel Lubezki, a three-time Oscar winner for Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant), production design and art direction. The kaleidoscopic, often surreal use of color; the consistently engaging content of the frame, along with the carefully calibrated use of deep focus; and the highly imaginative use of the wide-screen, high-resolution VistaVision format–all attest to Inárritu’s status as a modern “auteur.”
For all of its theatrics, Digger also has a Big Reveal. It’s partly narrative, partly structural and ultimately unnecessary. It undermines the message of the story without supporting it in any meaningful way. If you pay really close attention from the movie’s very first scene, you may start to suspect what’s coming in the final act. Even so, it’s a poor choice that ultimately registers as derivative.
Digger has all the elements of a brilliant mess. It has a strong cast (although the gifted German actress Sandra Hüller goes largely wasted as Emma), a rich visual component and timely theme. It also betrays a flawed script, awkward pacing and an off-putting, often annoying, sound design. Most importantly, it has Tom Cruise, whose work in Risky Business (1983) effectively launched his career. Here he gives his riskiest performance–forget about the remarkable physical stunts of other films for the moment–since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). You can readily sense the Oscar aspirations on display, including the physical transformation and the affected Texas accent of his own device. After three previous acting nominations, perhaps he will break through here. If he does, it will be a case of an actor successfully drilling deeper than the material.
