'Digger' review: Tom Cruise gets weird again with Iñárritu’s audacious climate satire
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
It’s easy to forget that Tom Cruise, now 64, used to experiment outside the proverbial franchise sandbox. In the years since his audacious supporting turn as Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder,” much of his filmography has been dominated by massive action spectacles in which he hurls himself off cliffs, hangs from airplanes or straps himself inside a fighter jet, all in the name of cinema. That commitment has understandably become inseparable from his screen persona, but it can overshadow the actor who gave us “Risky Business” and “The Color of Money,” went wonderfully feral in “Magnolia” and broke our hearts in “Rain Man” and “Jerry Maguire.” On that front alone, there’s something exhilarating about watching Cruise get weird again in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger.”
Cruise is buried beneath heavy makeup and prosthetics, the kind of physical transformation that can sometimes feel like catnip for awards voters, and perhaps there’s a little of that calculation here. But “Digger” feels driven by a larger desire to prove something, both about its star and the kind of movie Hollywood can still make around him. Here is an audacious, original studio picture reportedly carrying a massive $125 million budget, willing to push against conventional taste while reminding us that Cruise remains one of the most committed movie stars of his generation.
It’s refreshing to see him come down to size as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon staring down an ecological disaster largely of his own making. Iñárritu’s satire takes aim at powerful people who have spent decades ignoring the realities of climate change, but it doesn’t let the rest of us comfortably off the hook either. “Digger” is just as interested in the smaller compromises and rationalizations that allow catastrophe to become another part of everyday life. The movie has a few aces up its sleeve, an admirable ensemble and a leading man willing to go full tilt into material that doesn’t always work. Its ambitions occasionally overwhelm its execution, but there’s something invigorating about watching a movie this expensive take such an unapologetically strange swing.
And yes, as seemingly everyone on the internet has already established, “Digger” is going to be incredibly divisive. There’s something exciting about having a major studio movie capable of generating this kind of intense debate, especially one that refuses to sand down its stranger instincts for easier consumption. At the same time, it isn’t difficult to understand why casual moviegoers may recoil from an oddball satire that deliberately destabilizes itself about a third of the way through, introducing a surprising narrative thread that reframes what came before and expands the movie’s fixation on how readily society normalizes the cruelty of the world around us.
That shift is where “Digger” becomes both more interesting and more unwieldy. Iñárritu is reaching for something enormous, attempting to connect climate catastrophe, wealth, political power, personal responsibility and our ability to simply keep living while the world burns around us. Not every connection lands cleanly, and there are moments when the film’s eccentricities threaten to bury its ideas rather than sharpen them. It practically invites a second viewing just to untangle the scale of what Iñárritu is attempting, although whether that density feels rewarding or exhausting will probably depend on how willing you are to surrender to its wavelength.
Cruise, meanwhile, is a madman here. He plays Rockwell with a thick Southern drawl, an obsession with his 30-year-old cat Maggie and a peculiar fondness for tuna and finger guns. He’s clearly having a blast playing someone this bizarre, although his celebrity creates an amusing additional layer because it can be difficult to completely detach yourself from the Cruise of it all. Is that really Tom Cruise buried under prosthetics, sporting a fat suit and spending hours in a makeup chair to ironically resemble someone closer to his actual age? Why yes, it is.
Rockwell’s enormous wealth has afforded him equally enormous power, enough that he can command the president and members of his cabinet to his home when disaster strikes. As Digger’s head environmental safety scientist, Dr. Ginesh (a terrific Riz Ahmed), explains, a gigantic glacier roughly seven times the size of Boston has broken away from Greenland and is barreling toward Europe. The outlook is bleak, but “Digger” isn’t particularly interested in approaching the end of the world with solemnity.
Instead, everyone is initially dialed up to 11. There’s an almost manic, screwball energy running through the first act that only begins to reveal its purpose after the movie’s major second-act turn. President Compson (John Goodman), his vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Digger’s half-sister (Sandra Hüller) are all scrambling for some way out of the mess, each operating within a system built around protecting power rather than confronting reality.
Digger, in his own methodical way, decides to take the bull by the horns and insists that his people tell the world the truth. Of course, honesty becomes another form of theater when delivered by someone accustomed to controlling the room, and Rockwell can’t resist putting his own spin on impending catastrophe. That contradiction culminates in a grandstanding, nearly 10-minute monologue delivered before an assembly of European dignitaries, a speech that essentially distills the movie’s argument about society’s collective ineptitude in allowing disaster to unfold while everyone searches for someone else to blame. There are shades of Jack Nicholson’s “You need me on that wall” speech from “A Few Good Men,” particularly in the way Rockwell weaponizes uncomfortable truths to justify the very system that helped create the problem.
“Digger” is a strange movie, sometimes thrillingly so and sometimes to its own detriment. Its layers become more apparent the longer you sit with it, even if Iñárritu has a tendency to underline ideas that were already perfectly legible. There isn’t much subtlety to his political or environmental critique, nor does he seem particularly interested in pretending otherwise. The “Dr. Strangelove” influence hangs heavily over the proceedings, with people in positions of extraordinary power scrambling to maintain control as the world around them becomes increasingly unrecognizable.
At least the movie looks spectacular while everyone loses their minds. Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography gives the chaos tremendous scale on an IMAX screen, while Cosmo Sheldrake’s buoyant score creates an appropriately peculiar counterweight to the apocalyptic stakes. Iñárritu keeps pushing the movie between the grotesque and the beautiful, occasionally overloading the frame and the narrative with more ideas than either can comfortably hold.
But Cruise remains the gravitational center. After years spent hanging from airplanes and testing the physical limits of what a movie star can do, “Digger” gives him an opportunity to test a different muscle again. He’s surrounded by an equally committed band of misfits, including Jesse Plemons, who deserves flowers for a late-breaking speech that pulls the movie back from the brink of losing itself entirely. It provides “Digger” with something it desperately needs at that moment: emotional gravity. Beneath all the satire, spectacle and eccentricity is the recognition that acknowledging our complicity is only half the battle. Eventually, we also have to figure out how to live with what we’ve done and decide what comes next.
That’s ultimately what keeps “Digger” from disappearing beneath its own eccentricities. There’s a heart buried somewhere under Cruise’s heavy makeup, exaggerated accent and all the movie’s heightened theatrics, even when Iñárritu makes us work to find it. Its accessibility will certainly be questioned, and its ambitions sometimes exceed its grasp, but there’s no denying that “Digger” has tapped into something as messy, volatile and difficult to contain as the substance that made Rockwell powerful in the first place: the human spirit.
Grade: B
DIGGER is now playing in theaters.
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