Martinez Tribune The website of the Martinez Tribune.
BY TYLER HENSON
Digger (129mins)
Trailers for Digger would have us believe this film is a rollicking, larger than life comedy starring Tom Cruise, decked out in old age prosthetics and swaggering broadly with a Texas accent as the world collapses around him in environmental disaster. That is only partly true. Digger is actually something far more strange. A trailer won’t be able to convey it, and maybe not even a review. It is the most bizarre film released this year by a major studio. As a voracious moviegoer and lifelong film fan, I savor the opportunity to say this; I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
Cruise does indeed play a Texas oil billionaire, named Digger Rockwell, and he is almost unrecognizable with his movie star good looks and action hero physique hidden behind some very good makeup effects. He inhabits a satirized and strikingly stylized version of our own world. Digger finds himself at the center of a worldwide panic when one of his drilling operations in Greenland hits a methane deposit and sets off a chain reaction that results in global catastrophe. This, at first, appears to be the entire story. We are going to postpone potential spoilers for later.
First, let’s offer praise where praise is due. This is Tom Cruise’s best performance in decades. He is doing something he has never done before, not even in his memorable performance as vulgar producer Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (2008). Digger is a cartoon character brought to life, a brash and strutting tycoon who lives mostly in isolation on an enormous compound with his elderly dying cat, stubbornly making decisions that are good for business and bad for the world. Cruise gives this absurd creation a believable magnetism, crafty intelligence, and even an affecting hubris through the sheer force of his tremendous screen presence. There are moments in this film, such as an extended monologue delivered before the European Union, where Digger must fess up to his sins and does so in a most unexpected fashion, that generate as much horror, bleak hilarity, and perverse electricity as Cruise’s fearless work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999).
Not only is this a defiant reinvention of Cruise’s star power, it’s something of a comeback for two-time Oscar winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who hasn’t been heard from much since his back-to-back triumphs Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). He did release an experimental epic through Netflix in 2022, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, but it wasn’t seen by many, although it does contain some visionary images. Iñárritu no longer seems interested in maintaining his commercial success. If he was, he would have tried to play it safe with Digger. He does not.
The movie is a technical marvel, shot on large-format VistaVision film, sort of a slightly less bulky alternative to IMAX 70mm (Christopher Nolan’s preferred format). VistaVision has made a comeback recently, with last year’s One Battle After Another and Bugonia both being shot on the resurrected format. It does lend the images a grandiose size. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, also a multi-Oscar-winner, as well as production designer Dennis Gassner, have created a deliberately artificial world for these spectacular cameras. They avoid green screen and instead rely, conspicuously, on entrancing scale models, forced perspective miniatures, and trick sets, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the intricately composed storybook style of Wes Anderson.
Actually, there’s a closer comparison, though more obscure. Digger seems to emulate the work of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson, director of nihilistic and dryly funny films like Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). They are as weird as they sound. Andersson is famed for his use of elaborate sets and miniatures to create his distinctive worlds, and his stories focus exclusively on the absurd, banal tragedies of modern life. They’re like movies made by an alien race sent to study humanity. Iñárritu borrows some of that feeling and puts it to his own use, adding the expressive camera movements and fervent acting style that give his movies their notable charge.
Now we arrive at the unavoidable moment. In order to properly discuss this movie, and what makes it so unusual, we have to give away some surprises. If you intend to see this film, and don’t want the reveals spoiled, stop reading. Here it comes: there’s another, meta layer of story in Digger. It turns out, fairly early on, that we are seeing a recreation of events. The concept is a bit sci-fi, in that Digger’s story is being interpreted years after the fact by a Broadway production. The scenes of the film proper are actually recreations, the rehearsal stagings for this production, happening at an unspecified date in the future.
This means Tom Cruise has two roles. He plays Digger and the actor playing Digger in this production. This fictional actor is not unlike Cruise himself; famous, respected, and completely dedicated to his job, to the point it drives his collaborators crazy. Cruise will actually drop character to comment on scenes that have just concluded, as his other character, pointing out inaccuracies to his director and criticizing jokes that land flat. As enjoyable as it is to see him poke fun at himself, these scenes are also unbelievably disorienting. To many, it has made the movie come off as self-indulgent, snide, and pretentious.
This critic was also thrown wildly for a loop by Iñárritu’s choice to present the story in this way. But by the end, something even more unexpected happened; the choice validated itself. We will not spoil how this meta story develops or concludes, except to say that it leads to a subdued uppercut of an ending that is among the most chilling ever seen in a big-budget mainstream release. Iñárritu makes his feelings crystal clear; human civilization is on the verge of some terrible changes. Our current instability may not be prelude to apocalypse, but only a temporary period of chaos leading us into a world worse than we can imagine. And the scariest part? Once the change happens, it will soon be accepted as normal. Life will carry on, as it always has.
A lot of people are going to hate this movie. I mean really, really hate this movie. Is that a reason not to see it? Under normal circumstances, sure. In this case, maybe not. This critic is going to make an argument, perhaps a fruitless one, that Digger is something singular and unrepeatable, and must therefore be seen by as many people as possible. Will some of you leave the theater angry and confused? Will a good portion of Mission: Impossible fans conceivably remember it for the rest of their lives as the worst Tom Cruise movie they ever saw? Yes. So be it.
A good portion of viewers might also walk out of this movie feeling they’ve just seen something so outside the norm that it’s beyond belief. There will be justified hate, and justified pushback against the hate. This film has been made to spark argument and discussion. That is something large, mainstream films have been mostly afraid to do these last couple decades. Is it a masterpiece? This critic is not totally sure. I came out of the movie with a sense of awe and something approaching shock. That could be the initial reaction produced by a masterpiece. Of one thing I am convinced; it will still be talked about with great enthusiasm ten, twenty years from now. People are going to say things like, “Did you ever see Digger? Nobody could make a movie that crazy today!” How many movies a year can you say that about?
