The cat seems unwell. Fluffy white felines have long had a place in cinema—it’s been over six decades since Ernst Stavro Blofeld sinisterly stroked the coat of his pet kitty while threatening James Bond—but this little furball isn’t bright-eyed or cuddly. It’s a wheezing, whimpering creature, skin stretched over its bones, incapable of moving or eating on its own. Its strongest display of activity is the yowl it emits when a thermometer enters its anus, but otherwise it lacks the energy to even mewl. Weak and exhausted, it’s waiting for a benevolent executioner to put it out of its misery. The longer Digger goes on, the more likely you are to yearn for a similar act of mercy.
Or maybe not. Digger, the latest misbegotten epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, isn’t an especially appealing movie. It’s long, overdetermined, and—as with all of its maker’s films—self-indulgent. But it is also monumentally ambitious, and it unfolds with a level of stylistic bravado that tunes some of its more discordant notes back into harmony. (Speaking of music, the jittery, often insufferable score is by Cosmo Sheldrake.) If it’s a debacle, at least it’s one for the ages.
As it happens, catastrophe is the subject of Digger, which satirizes society’s cataclysmic response (or lack thereof) to climate change. Similar to Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, it attempts to convey despair not with gravity or outrage, but with foolishness and humor. Its principal characters are old, egotistical white men, seated around stately tables or crowding in lacquered chambers, yelling and bickering and behaving like absolute idiots. They are rich and powerful and stupid, and it is their selfishness and myopia that prompts the environmental crisis which serves as the movie’s narrative spine. Real life has no shortage of villains to blame for our impending ecological collapse. Digger has Tom Cruise.
For the past 40 years—beginning with Top Gun and continuing with various enterprises, most notably the Mission: Impossible films but also airport thrillers (Jack Reacher and its sequel), sci-fi flicks (the excellent Edge of Tomorrow, the underrated Oblivion), and, er, miscellaneous vehicles (The Mummy)—Cruise has expended considerable effort in saving the world, so it’s only fair that he now receives the opportunity to destroy it. In his late period, he’s drawn so much attention for his death-defying stunts that it’s been easy to miss the sturdiness of his craft—the way he can ground the surrounding absurdity with his physical presence and his rugged intensity, to say nothing of his natural charm. Still, with the exception of American Made (plus his small part in Rock of Ages), it’s been eons since he’s played someone other an action hero, and the sameness has flattened the arc of his career, limiting his occasions to convey the range of emotions he displayed in movies as varied as Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, and Vanilla Sky.
Digger affords him the chance to alter this trajectory. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil baron with a fat bank account, an ever larger potbelly, and a Texas accent so voluptuous, it makes Matthew McConaughey sound like Matthew Macfadyen. Digger is arrogant, prosperous, and wholly allergic to responsibility. So when he learns, from a scientist in his employ called Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, a fine foil), that an explosion at one of his refineries in Greenland has unleashed a gigantic ice shelf that’s primed to incite a deadly tsunami in Europe, he swiftly summons the U.S. President (a haggard-looking John Goodman) for a strategy session—not to prevent disaster, but to minimize fallout and deflect blame.
From the instant Digger wakes in his silken bed and starts cooing to that wretched cat, Cruise announces the movie’s exaggerated tone. It’s a flamboyant performance—the most visible, capital-A acting he’s done since Tropic Thunder, when he zealously lampooned a Hollywood executive. He had a supporting role there, but in Digger he is inescapable—on screen virtually every second, assaulting you with vigor and wildness and sheer volume. It’s hardly Cruise’s best work, but it’s decidedly watchable; he’s a charismatic black hole, drawing you to him as he swallows all of the room’s oxygen.
He also reflects his director’s maximalist sensibility. It’s hard to remember now, but Iñárritu was once an industry golden boy, having won back-to-back Oscars in 2014 and 2015 for Birdman and The Revenant—with the former also taking home Best Picture. (His first nomination came eight years earlier for the underappreciated Babel.) Since then, he’s done remarkably little: a short, a couple of music videos, and just one feature, Bardo—a crude piece of cinematic grandstanding. Even at his apex, Iñárritu was polarizing, and I half-wondered if he’d spent his hiatus learning to modulate his aggressive instincts.
Not so much. Digger is a furiously effortful production, full of sweeping flourishes and self-regarding grandiosity. This isn’t entirely a complaint. Visually, the film is operatic but also elegant, deploying the fluid oners that long ago became the calling card of Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu’s regular cinematographer. The editing, notwithstanding the abiding extravagance, is reasonably lucid. And the opulent set design, with its baroque atmosphere and ostentatious backdrops, looks intentionally artificial, for reasons that only gradually become clear. Watching the movie is a bit like submerging yourself in a noxious swamp and marveling, in spite of yourself, at the unique pungency of the odor.
For all its decadence, Digger is essentially a dialogue comedy, proceeding as a series of strenuous conversations over four rough-hewn chapters. Its centerpiece is a bloviating address that its antihero gives in an amphitheater to a mob of angry politicians, countering their rage with unapologetic triumphalism. In Digger’s mind, widespread planetary destruction is a necessary consequence of his oil production, which he views not as mercenary profiteering but as an invaluable public service. It’s a vibrant sequence, and Cruise gives it his all; it recalls his climactic showdown with Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, only now he’s occupying the role of Nicholson’s war criminal, snarling that “you need me on that wall.”
Unfortunately, the majority of Digger is markedly less entertaining and commensurately less funny. Iñárritu is plainly aiming for the apocalyptic comedy of Dr. Strangelove, and while that’s an unfair bar, the screenplay—credited to him and three other writers—whiffs far too often. Sure, there are amusing moments, like when Goodman’s prez chastises an underling for using foul language because “there are women present,” then cackles when everyone realizes there isn’t an XX chromosome in sight. (Shortly thereafter, Digger proposes using AI to implement an “information firewall” that will scrub social media of any undesirable terms, and someone suggests, “Al Gore.”) But too much of the movie involves characters simply flinging words back and forth with no comic rhythm, mistaking sweatiness for excitement and outlandishness for wit.
Perhaps sensing this, Iñárritu builds in a framing device, attempting to place all of the desperate lunacy in a broader context. The details are best kept vague to avoid spoilers (Jesse Plemons shows up to soothe everyone’s nerves), but it’s designed to wrap Digger in a self-insulating cocoon, shielding it from accusations of extremism or inanity. Think this is all too silly, too shrill, too bonkers? That’s just on purpose.
It’s another bold move that also, ironically, operates as a half-measure, stunting the movie’s breathless momentum without making it any more persuasive as a piece of satire. And yet, despite its thin characters and its clumsy themes, Digger’s utter heedlessness allows it to develop a demented form of integrity. It may not be plausible or provocative or even good, but it is undeniably interesting. (This differentiates it from Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, another herculean picture that was too incoherent to be intriguing.)
“It’s just a little too much,” somebody says at one point. It’s an obvious piece of lampshading—the whole movie is too much—but if Digger doesn’t entirely refute the specific objection, it does at least mount a noisy defense of lavish creative filmmaking in general. Original cinema is under existential threat from a tidal wave of corporatized projects, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu is here to safeguard it with all his strident pomposity. You may not enjoy his work. But you need him on that wall.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.