There is something wonderfully unhinged about Digger. Odd, strange, occasionally frustrating and ultimately compelling, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film plays like a modern-day parable made by someone who has looked at the state of the world and decided conventional storytelling simply won’t cut it.
The problem is getting there.
For much of its first half, Digger is a struggle. It is deliberately abrasive, overstuffed and difficult to get a handle on. Iñárritu piles absurdity upon absurdity, pushing his satire until you wonder whether the whole enterprise might collapse under the weight of its own ambition.
Then something happens. The film finds its rhythm, its madness begins to make sense, and Digger comes roaring to life.
Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a fabulously wealthy oil magnate whose actions have helped precipitate an environmental catastrophe. Cruise is surrounded by an extraordinary ensemble including Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, but this is unmistakably his show.
And what a performance it is.
Cruise has spent decades perfecting the art of being Tom Cruise: the movie star who runs faster, flies higher and works harder than everyone around him. Here, under Iñárritu’s direction, he gleefully tears that image apart. Digger is grotesque, funny, arrogant, vulnerable and frequently ridiculous. Cruise disappears into him without ever surrendering the charisma that has made him one of cinema’s last genuine superstars.
The result may be one of the strangest performances of Cruise’s career — and one of his best.
Around him, Iñárritu takes aim at almost everything: institutions, capitalism, environmental hypocrisy, political power and, particularly, the seemingly immovable presence of wealthy white men — and increasingly old wealthy white men — running the world. John Goodman’s President Compson sits comfortably within the film’s carnival of power, while Riz Ahmed’s scientist Ganesh provides a counterweight to the insanity surrounding him.
At its heart, though, Digger is about something painfully simple: saving the planet.
That gives all the surrealism a surprisingly serious undertow. For all its jokes and provocations, this is a film staring into the future and asking what happens if humanity continues down the same road. Digger isn’t so much a warning sign as a road sign pointing towards what could be ahead.
And it is searing in its originality.
In an era of franchises, sequels and cinematic universes, there is something thrilling about watching a major filmmaker and one of the world’s biggest stars take a swing this enormous. Not everything connects. The first hour could lose plenty of viewers. But once Digger clicks into gear, there is genuinely nothing else quite like it.
And Cruise? Will he finally win a competitive Oscar? He certainly deserves one for plenty of things he’s done in the past.
So why not give him one now?
Sean Sennett