‘Digger’: A Dynamic Tom Cruise Basks in Billionaire Madness for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Dystopian Vanity Project

Alci Rengifo

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” is both an Oscar campaign and a loud vomiting of everything the filmmaker clearly feels about the state of the world. In the first category, Tom Cruise is certainly hoping this will be the film that nabs him an Oscar. He has delivered good dramatic roles before, but controversy and the riches of franchise box office have kept him relegated to standing on the pantheon of a mere movie star. However audiences respond to this challenging film, it is admirable that Cruise chose to take a risk. “Digger” is the strangest major studio production to come out this year. It’s an arthouse experiment, radical political tract, often becoming pretentious, then fascinating. 

Cruise is the dead center of the whole enterprise as Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy oil man, the richest in the world. While tending to his dying cat in a lavish, though quickly decaying estate, Digger receives some urgent news. One of his rigs has caused a major crack in the Arctic that could separate a massive ice shell. At first Digger is reluctant to accept any of this, preferring to rant at his beleaguered employees via video call. As expected, a large glacier does break off and is now floating at formidable speed towards Europe, where it will cause apocalyptic tsunamis. Forced to face reality, Digger meets with U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) and his trusted scientist, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), as well as the rest of the president’s wacky cabinet. Ganesh insists there is not much to be done except wait and hope the elements intervene. Compson prefers to keep the public in the dark about what’s going on. And then, Digger seems to forget what he is meant to say because this is all a staged play sometime in the future of events that did indeed transpire 25 years earlier.

Say what? Iñárritu decides to pull the rug from under the audience, at least early enough instead of using it as the climax. Yet, it is testament to the film’s uniqueness and curse. Over the last decade or so, the multiple Oscar-winning Mexican auteur has left behind the filmmaker of gritty, despairing takes on the human condition. His acclaimed 2000 debut, “Amores Perros,” was part of a renaissance of Mexican cinema first initiated by Salvador Carrasco’s “The Other Conquest,” as well as the works of Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro. Subsequent Iñárritu films like “21 Grams,” “Babel” and “Biutiful” retained a particular starkness. After scooping Best Director and Picture Oscars for 2014’s “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” a funny portrait of a franchise actor trying to find respect by staging a Broadway play, Iñárritu has felt like an emperor flush with power and gold. He can no longer just make a good film. He must find a way to make a maximalist testament to his genius. Surely the impulse was fed when he picked up another Best Director Oscar for “The Revenant,” making him one of the few to take the statue back-to-back. A major warning sign came in 2022 with “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” a meandering, taxingly pretentious biographical fantasy.

“Digger” explores a worthier, undeniably timely theme. Tom Cruise’s manic performance, in which the celebrity disappears under makeup aging him further, on its own can be a funny, morbid caricature of the billionaire class dominating the system. Digger is touted as the most powerful man in the world, since money talks above any president. He tempts Ganesh with rare tuna on a flight, knowing the environmentally-conscious scientist will give in and try it. Everyone around Digger is just as overwrought, from Michael Stuhlbarg’s twitchingly nervous Vice President to Goodman’s commander-in-chief, constantly shouting then bemoaning his rectal cancer. Obvious inspirations abound like Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” while the entire idea of a theater production as its own world recalls Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.” 

A difference is that those films were made by directors who mastered the respective genres or tones they were playing with. The screenplay by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman has all too brief flashes of truly engaging material that gets swallowed by the behemoth of the rest. There is also the challenge of making on the nose satire at a time when reality already surpasses it. No one in the cast can possibly measure up to Trump, JD Vance or a true model of unabashed fascism like Stephen Miller. We know the ultra-rich corporate class is dismissing climate change, or cynically ignores its realities, for the sake of profit. Yet, Digger holding up the shovel his grandfather once used to dig earth looks so tame next to Elon Musk hoisting a chainsaw. Cruise’s best moment, which also goes on too long, is a long speech on a rotating surface where he tells some kind of parliament that men like him are needed and wanted in a consumerist world. His oil makes it possible to purchase things, cars and other toys. A better scene comes when the president and Digger fly over the menacing detached glacier with plans to bomb it, since all rationality has gone out the door. 

Such a scene would have more impact if Iñárritu didn’t insist on dragging out the narrative, making it meandering for the sake of showing off its IMAX scale. Famed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s work is impressive, as is to be expected. He creates the sensation of a dreamlike, enclosed world in the stage where characters chat in front of highly detailed dioramas. Alas, scenes go on and on and on, losing initial punch. Side stories without purpose keep interrupting, like Curtis Markson aka Digger on stage, keeping track of phone calls because his daughter is flying amid a potentially dangerous storm. There are absurd arguments with the director of the production (which is titled “Fossil Fuels”), Hannah (Sophie Wilde) that generate confusion when it comes to Iñárritu’s own aims. There is already a growing perception in some reviews that maybe “Digger” is meant to satirize satires themselves. Is the rather (at least in his films) apolitical Iñárritu swiping at artists who wear their hearts on their sleeves? But then again, it could simply be a director trying to use a voice he never truly had. Iñárritu is not necessarily a funny person by nature, so he lacks the wittier punches of Adam McKay or masters like Ken Russell.

As for Tom Cruise, he does deliver some impressive bits, pushing himself to levels only seen rarely in films like “Magnolia,” and what possibly remains his best role, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July.” As a Hollywood power player who has no doubt met many Diggers in his time, Cruise taps into the farcical confidence, vanity and near-derangement of having too much power yet little intellect. His Texas twang has a fittingly grating rhythm. We then have to wonder what the point is of then writing the role as a performance within the “performance.” Curtis breaks out of character and shouts at Hannah that there was more to Digger than what is depicted. The final scene reveals the world outside as a confirmation of what scientists have been telling us for years, that the great cities will flood and the air will turn toxic. If Iñárritu believes it, he may be on the right side of history, but with this film he has dug a vast hole for a movie that celebrates the egos of its talents, threatening to leave us too worn out to care about the rest.

“Digger” releases Oct. 2 in theaters nationwide.