Halfway through one of the most ambitious films to release this decade, Tom Cruise’s potbellied, cowboy-hat-fitted oil tycoon Digger Rockwell draws an imaginary gun and fires a series of imaginary shots. “When all else fails, you hit ’em with the truth,” he says in his comically over-the-top Texan drawl, speaking both of his plans to blame the American people for the ecological disaster he’s caused, but also of the fact that this was an easily avoidable apocalypse. As he says multiple times in his address to this film’s equivalent of the European Parliament, he knew it was going to happen eventually—but so did everyone else.
As usual, massive spoilers ahead. The plot of Digger, of which there is a sneakily considerable amount, starts with Rockwell being abruptly informed that, as a result of his company ignoring the accumulation of methane, an explosion has sent a massive ice shelf barreling toward Europe. Together with the President (John Goodman) and environmental safety advisor Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger begins dealing with the fallout in incredibly foolish and outlandish ways, like threatening to nuke China to create a distraction. But contrary to whatever the trailers may have implied, this is not the straightforward satire you might be expecting. The film also follows actor Curtis Markson, the man playing Rockwell in a stage production of “Fossil Fools,” a play documenting his life. That’s right: everything we see of Rockwell is from within this play, as Markson and his fellow actors recreate Digger’s infamous folly on a luxurious, gigantic set.
The purpose of all this meta rejiggering becomes clear once Markson begins expressing concerns over his performance. This guy wasn’t such a ridiculous buffoon in reality—he was composed, Markson complains to the play’s director (Sophie Wilde). It’s only when Jesse Plemons’s Kenny (the creator of Fossil Fools and Digger’s nephew) steps in that the show goes on. Sure, Digger was monstrously evil. But, Kenny argues, this is how the common man gets his revenge: by sitting in a dark theater and laughing his butt off at the exaggerated ego of such a powerful person. This is the catharsis art offers; this is how we deal with the real-world effects of death and war and destruction.
Digger feels like Alejandro Iñárritu’s hate letter to cinema. The film is a farce about American politics, but it’s also about storytelling, the responsibilities of the artist, and the role of art, one with what consistently feels like a cynical take overall. Satire helps us deal with tragedy, but what power does it hold when the things we used to satirize are once again reality? What’s so funny about watching a cartoonishly evil prick look you in the eye and tell you he’d do it all over again? Is a happy ending useless once you turn off the TV? At the end of the in-universe performance, Markson and company receive a standing ovation and bask in the applause of an adoring crowd, who can’t get enough of Digger’s pathetic death at the end of the play. Yet when they exit the auditorium a few moments later, they dutifully attach gas masks to their faces before being greeted by a dark and violent dystopia filled with soldiers and violence and filth. Remember, Iñárritu says, the events of the play are true. All of this comically evil evil happened. And a less extreme version of it is happening in our world, too, just like the events Dr. Strangelove sent up so long ago. Still laughing?
It’s a dense film and a bleak film, highly experimental in structure and both set and production design (the prosthetic cat that Digger refuses to let die is a standout), made even more intriguing by the fact that it’s the first non-action movie in nearly a decade for Tom Cruise. And it’s a hell of a choice for Warner Bros. to drop $100 million on in marketing. I found Digger endlessly fascinating throughout, even if it doesn’t always make for top-tier entertainment; as an anti-comedy, it’s not very “funny” in the traditional sense, and even though Cruise does some pretty excellent acting overall, he’s stuck in a film just as Vanilla Sky as Tropic Thunder, a combination that can’t be playing to anyone’s strengths. Digger is seemingly designed to be an unpleasant and off-putting watch—every other scene is a bunch of bureaucratic a-holes shouting at the top of their lungs, so much so that whenever things switched to outside the play, I audibly breathed a sigh of relief that I was watching a normal person speak at a normal volume again.
But as an Iñárritu fan, it’s clear that age and an ever-increasing litany of haters have failed to slow him down. Paradoxically, this is what art was designed for: leaving questions that worm into the viewer’s brain long after the quips and outbursts and dance moves (of which there are disappointingly few) have left. Digger not only sees the Mexican filmmaker at his most ambitious, but it’s anyone at their most ambitious; last year’s Megalopolis will be brought up in the coming weeks as a comparable swing, but even that film can’t compare with the scope of a film about art, politics, the environment, and acting—a film that is clearly attempting to be the defining film of our time.
Then there’s the Cruise angle. It’s even better to see Cruise acting again. The ten-minute monologue I mentioned at the beginning is practically dedicated to proving he’s still got it, and even though the Scientology thing will always be there, it’s oddly heartening to see cinema’s “last movie star” push himself so far and risk embarrassment in ways that he’s never really done. (It’s also nice to see Cruise take aim at the current administration so viciously—or sort of, anyway, since his real-life apoliticism still seems to directly fall in line with the attitude this film is questioning.)
The ambition behind Digger has dug the film’s grave, I suppose. It’s an important movie that will very likely be one of the biggest flops of all time once it’s said and done, which only adds another layer of irony to the ideas being explored here. And it is, to be a sure, a flawed film. But while I didn’t hear the resounding crack some of us were hoping for, a work of art this self-effacing, this genuinely concerned with the state of the world, this willing to ask the big questions of an audience who has perennially avoided them, can hardly be described as a whiff. And as the film itself argues, sometimes hitting a home run is less impressive than hustling your way to third. If humanity hobbles along long enough, I predict a Digger Criterion will sit on store shelves one day. We can only hope the joke will be on Iñárritu. 10-4-26
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