Digger review: Flamboyant Tom Cruise hauls this cerebral, showboating satire

This pontification about our times, about our collective universal living experience, is also — quite interestingly — the essence of modern storytelling. It is as though film criticism’s aforementioned ideology has been absorbed by filmmaking as well to form a self-completing whole, wherein movies too have grown to become hyper aware of what they are saying, how they are saying it, and most importantly, how pertinent they feel to the viewer. And since movies have filmmakers attached to them, one tends to now find the worldview or predispositions of a filmmaker overwhelming the viewing experience, making their presence felt throughout in a manner that is almost intrusive, impositional. The presence is no longer a device that allows a director to curate a specific experience — we know there’s a Scorsese behind Goodfellas because of the irony he employs all along — but rather a tool of indulgence that engages with the viewer without ever being invited to.

In fairness, though, indulgence mustn’t be looked down upon, especially when it allows a filmmaker like Alejandro González Iñárritu to create the body of work that he has over the last 26 years. Iñárritu’s oeuvre is of two distinct halves, with the first part comprising feverish hyperlink films such as Amores Perros (2000) and Babel (2006), and the second (and ongoing) one churning out starkly postmodernist works like Birdman (2014) and Bardo (2022).

The switch in style as well as curiosities (from outward to inward-facing) are clear as day, but Iñárritu has embraced it wholeheartedly because of an artistic rigour that always wishes to push the boundary. His forte has always been to play with cinematic form as much as possible, but the last decade or so has seen him employ craft to such a pronounced degree that an Iñárritu film, today, cannot be ridden off his choreographic imprint. The camera that once restlessly moved through his narratives because of their underlying emotional chaos now feels to be firm in a mind that's reflecting upon both self and the physical world it inhabits. Consequently, his presence too has assumed greater prominence in his more recent films.

Case in point is his latest outing, Digger, where he is joined by Tom Cruise.

A parody of evil

Cruise is the biggest marquee name of this project, but Digger is undoubtedly an Inarritu film for reasons that are both self-explanatory and highly secretive. The former, because the 63-year-old director, who co-wrote the script with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone, returns to capturing an interiority, à la Birdman, that is at odds with the people and circumstances around it. The latter is a spoiler that would ruin the entire conceit of a movie hinging upon usurping all expectations set by its promotional material. It’d perhaps be very difficult to critique the film without discussing the way its narrative is constructed, but suffice to say that it nevertheless reaffirms its maker's current metatextual inclinations.

What we can talk about is Cruise playing the titular role (Digger Rockwell), about the film being a caustic satire about ultra-rich capitalists and politicians’ ways of working and living and about the cruel fact that evil becomes a parody of itself over time, no matter how evil it was at one point.

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Digger Rockwell’s multigenerational mega enterprise owns oil rigs that dig out billions worth of oil in places like Greenland (which have been leased out to him by governments) and even the President of the United States (John Goodman as Compson) is in cahoots with him. Rockwell is an old, loveless man who wakes up every morning to the deathly cries of his cat in a palatial home seemingly built on all his global pillaging and one such morning knocks him out of his bed with the friendly caution that his unchecked drilling activity has literally broken the Arctic landmass.

As Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the head of his environmental security, puts it: a massive ice slope the size of Manhattan and named cutely as Judy, is now floating towards the Scandinavian side of Europe to destroy it completely. The $18 trillion worth of property will be damaged and the world at large will be turned upside down forever, but for Rockwell, panic is always an opportunity worth capitalising on.

Tasked to be over the top

Given the scale of the scheme of things here, the Dr. Strangelove (and a bit of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 release Putney Swope, too) comparisons are inevitable for Digger and there are plenty here. The famous war room scenario in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film served greatly to showcase the farce and daftness with which a potential apocalypse is discussed and the same is reimagined by Iñárritu and his production designer Dennis Gassner as a Sistine Chapel-like, biblically-muralled space inside Rockwell’s own home.

Ganesh talks of the damning scale of the ice slope, to which the US military chief responds with swaggering stupidity (as George C. Scott’s General Turgidson does in Dr. Strangelove) that he can get it bombed to pieces, while a priest sermonises in absolute gibberish to the motley crew of the most vile, morally corrupt and powerful men. Rockwell’s half-sister, Emma (Sandra Hüller, in one of her lesser-taxing roles), too, steps into the action from time to time to collar-grab her brother and remind him that his sinking will also drown her company Verdant, which is ironically the family conglomerate’s environmentally-focused arm.

It’s a setting where all performances are dialled up to an idiosyncratic level of over-the-top and everyone gladly accepts the task. For Cruise, especially, his role feels tailor-made given how he likes to perform with a pouncing cat’s authority and commitment and he does a fascinating job in Digger by letting the arclights see through every aspect of his performance; from the heavy maquillage that doesn’t effectively cover his nervy real-life physicality to the actor’s own insatiable desire to always challenge himself in the most conscious, showboating ways — all of it.

Inundated by sophistication

But, as already referred to in this review, Digger isn’t really about Cruise or Rockwell or Judy, as much as it is about a formal construct direly trying to self-actualise. Iñárritu’s design is bold and full of conviction and his scope takes on many movie genres and moods at once — in fact, as one pivotal scene in the pre-climax spells it out for a completely different context, this film allows itself to be a gloomy portrait of a ‘seductive villain’, a buffoon show and everything in between. And appropriately, his 129-minute narrative takes those leaps at fancy whims, and helps them land at least a few times.

The issue, however, is that it wants to be an experiment so desperately and nothing else that it gets way too ahead of itself and never bothers to tether itself to the viewer’s innocence.

Digger is sophisticated and often so inundated by its own sophistication that it always keeps the audience at bay, despite having a few compelling arguments about the past, grief and the curious role art plays amidst all of this.

It professes that art is a vessel for truth, one that can be incredibly useful in casting pain and memory in a new light — at least for a while, as all mass art intends — while simultaneously being a purist exercise that renders its very subject less essential in its wake. Interestingly, the latter is also its thesis or explanation, because it wants to approach its viewer with passion, albeit by standing on a pedestal that intentionally causes a difference in stature.

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Does a film really offer joy, then, if it works only on a cerebral level? Depends on who is asked, and ‘joy’ is quite the operative word in Digger’s case, given the humour with which it conducts itself.

The humour lies everywhere — in its on-the-nose and didactic wordplay, in its tragic situations and also in its unabashed ways of navigating its narrative. The problem is a lot of it isn’t particularly funny and the full-swing ambition doesn’t take time to exasperate or annoy the audience. Barring a couple of scenes — Cruise’s bombastic monologue in an assembly hall filled with vampire-like humans and a few mannequins, in particular — there aren’t any that hit home in an endearing, memorable way.

But Iñárritu is clearly a man of flamboyance and ideas and not one to stop in his tracks anytime soon, so it remains to be seen how this one holds up with time.