Digger Review: Tom Cruise And Alejandro Iñárritu Team Up For A Delusional Slog

Digger is as depleting as films can get. Watching it is like being flogged mercilessly by its spitfire of self-aggrandising attitudes, a battery of dead metaphors. Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a self-indulgent filmmaker of some other bizarre dimension altogether. This isn’t a complaint. When an artist is as self-absorbed and thrilled by the import of their own statements and themes, it’s the ultimate act of inciting profound annoyance. It wants to say something about the dire state of the world, how we cope with the ever-increasing assault of horrors, the lavish, careless games of the uber-rich casually plunging civilisation into utter chaos. Is satire the only way to find some sort of release from the dread capitalism has forced upon the planet? Is it an evasion or the only honest, fitting response to grief and rage? All are welcome anxieties to examine. But Digger ploughs on and on with the kind of inflated self-regard that instantly spells doom for any undertaking. The final nail in the coffin is the coup casting of Tom Cruise.

Cruise plays an American oil tycoon, Digger Rockwell, who’s cheerfully blase to the fallout of his drilling. Like any standard oligarch, he has bought off governments and media, promoted lies to the public, held up the façade until shit hits the fan. A pack of cards starts collapsing. But “words are perception” and perception is reality, he insists. He has long engineered a certain construct of reality, foisted a representation of lies and manipulation. He’s a man of shameless, bald arrogance. He strolls through his mansion with zero compunction while the world outside sinks. But how long can he waive off global warming? Distressing news escalates and compels him to confront those head-on. A glacial shelf has broken off, ramming into Europe in a trail of devastation. The years of extraction Digger’s company has done into the Arctic north have earlier too thrust warnings at Digger and his father. Both ignored. Now, Digger has been summoned to answer to an angry mob of world leaders. He doesn’t admit to himself the severity of the situation. He dismisses the climate change danger as simply “the price of doing business”.

An early scene Digger has with his company’s environmental advisor, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), holds the most telling glimpses into his brand of expert manipulation, gaslighting people to falling for a desired narrative.

Iñárritu is too besotted with his own pompous lines to serve any bracing send-up. The script is credited to Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, Sabina Berman and Jez Butterworth. That’s a lot of people and might have a hand in how confused, rudderless and borderline incoherent Digger appears, hedged within faux-liberal drivel. Digger unfolds like a skit, till we are told why it is what it is. Not a shred of subtlety is to be found in the writing. It’s deliberately over-the-top. But even ludicrousness must have a convincing grammar, a design that amuses, provokes and illuminates. Instead, Iñárritu is entirely focused on gnarly renditions of his ignoble, repugnant protagonist just as he pitches s cartoonishly narcissistic American president (John Goodman). Across the board, the hamming stays constant, unyielding. Even the great Sandra Hüller comes off wholly wonky and miserably lost amidst the barking.

There’s a characteristic showiness to the staging, the verbal artillery that quickly gets grating. Digger is drab. It’s plodding. It refuses to relent where instead the humour should have had caustic edges. It’s one thing to design a skewering satire, quite another for that to turn out to be this grade of airless projection. For its entirety, I teetered between rank boredom, gnawing irritation and flat-out disinterest. I couldn’t remotely care for the apparent digs, the film’s certain declaration of its own noble ambitions. The braggadocio extends to the filmmaker demanding we applaud and be taken in by the elaborate stage effects. Dennis Gassner’s production design is intricate, shrewd and undeniably arresting. Iñárritu heavily relies on the movement through a space, how it folds back and reveals a twist, to keep us invested.

However, more effort seems to have been just devoted to yanking out admiration than bringing heart, humanity or the slightest zest into the film itself. It desperately craves us to be awed by the maze-like blinds within itself, its several layers of theatrical orchestration. Throughout, Digger keeps prodding how he has faith in a higher power. He invokes it later as well in the final reflection of his supersized denial. However, everything just veers closer to painfully misjudged reading of ribald than anywhere with satiric twang. Lest we miss the point, Digger even lays out the thesis behind its tone. It hurries to underline everything, down to a groan-inducing monologue on what makes satires click for an especially bereaved, agitated lot.

Cruise’s transformation in Digger, replete with the paunch and the accent, recalls another disastrous misjudgement, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. Both films seem tailormade primarily for Oscars. Like Maestro’s big scene, where Cooper’s conductor sublimates himself into the swell of his music, Digger boasts a centrepiece ten-minute scene of Cruise charging with a no-holds-barred monologue. He rains fusillade right back on the elite prosecuting him. Digger slams them as complicit as well. He prides himself on “supplying the freedom” for them to revel in the easy convenience of unsustainable lives. He puts it all out in clear, direct terms, challenging all to look in the mirror themselves before flatly accusing him. None of this is even faintly effective. All of Digger’s blustering, its meta tricks and shallow twists aggregate to just a vapid enterprise that runs on dry. It stays in liege to its fanciful elevation, sorely unable to land anywhere sincere or cutting.