Alejandro González Iñarritu is an intrepid filmmaker playing in a world of bootlickers and undignified philistines. He’s the kind of artist a big studio would never support, unless the stars somehow aligned to give him full reign to do whatever he sees fit (within budget). The stars, in his case, came in the form of the surprising critical and audience success of his Birdman film that was showered with Oscars and acclaim. The lesson AGI took from this success wasn’t that Hollywood likes introspective comedies; if he reached that conclusion, then his next films would’ve been different. No, the lesson AGI seemed to take from the popularity of Birdman was that people really like him at his most difficult and patronising. An artist preaching about the incongruities of the world from a pulpit to an audience of puzzled, curious passersby.
That’s how we get to Digger, a brave and baffling film about how everyone is stupid except Iñarritu. Camus finished The Stranger with the quote “all I have to wish for is that they receive me with cries of hatred on the day of my execution”. What a sucker. Iñarritu would never get himself caught.
Digger follows one Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an oil magnate, who we first meet waking from his big, lavish cat-piss-soaked bed. His cat is dying, but so too is the world. And while for the cat, Digger keeps trying to save even if it’s evident he’s parading around a feline corpse, for the world, he gives little care.
The problem is this is all his fault - one of his oil rigs in Greenland dug just a little too deep and broke a large iceberg, several times larger than Philadelphia, that is heading towards Europe.
It’s up to him, with the help of his head scientist, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), to convince the President of the United States (John Goodman) and the entire European Council that this catastrophe Digger created can be fixed only by Digger himself.
It’s a farce, and like a farce it plays along. The war room from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove is replaced by a meeting of the all-male President’s cabinet, where the defence secretary (Robert John Burke) wants to resolve everything by bombing shit up, and the vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg) is as ineffectual as a Vice President is.
Most interestingly is the European Parliament. A tight semi-circle embossed in white light that contrasts with the extreme whiteness of its politicians. Digger is received with cries of hatred (ah ah!) and works hard to convince them to follow his recommendation. It plays a little bit like the trial scene in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, but with Cruise channelling his character in Magnolia, Frank T.J. Mackey.
The twist, which I won’t spoil here, is Iñarritu’s biggest surprise that the marketing campaign, for better or for worse, hides from the audience. It’s a pull-the-rug moment that happens around the end of the film’s first third and complete readjusts how we’re supposed to see this story. It also brings a new element into Iñarritu’s web of sardonic accusations. He doesn’t hold back from attacking the world for the dystopian nightmare we are slowly descending into. He blames the politicians, the military industry, and the economic system that lets people like Digger become so powerful that they can build and destroy the world at their whim. But after that twist, Iñarritu tries to be coy about his final accusation, like a naughty wink to the audience; he blames us, the people seeking entertainment, for adjusting and advocating the status quo.
In the film’s best scene, the long shot that rolls the credits, he imagines a very near future that feels very real and tangible in the year 2026. But it also brings up Iñarritu’s condescending tone. It starts with a group of people leaving a theatre for a bleak and totalitarian urban landscape of police state, unbreathable air and drones. Of course, there’s a poster advertising Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (bold of Iñarritu to remind us of a better, bleaker and more absurdist post-apocalyptic story), because at this point there’s no need for subtlety. But where the scene, and pretty much the whole third act, fails is at forgetting the role of himself, the author whose film is financed by a company about to be sold to a far-right proto-fascist zionist nepobaby with delusions of grandeur and supportive of the current, also far-right proto-fascist zionist nepobaby president of the United States of America. Somehow, like in Bardo and Birdman, Iñarritu lets the artist off from the grim reality that awaits us. In fact ego, like in those films, and in The Revenant, is a tool of redemption. Deserving of atonement and redemption, not retribution.
The marketing team advertises Digger as a Tom Cruise film, which is pretty brave. Cruise is good in it, with his grotesque old suit and drooling southern accent. He gives himself body and soul to the project. He stands his ground next to people like Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemmons, who know the fine line between intensity and overacting.
But the film isn’t Cruise’s, it’s Emmanuel Lubezki’s. The Mexican cinematographer, who constantly reinvents himself, and here it is so important that he even has a credit as Executive Producer, gets to show off his style with the support of some great production designers. Filled with these dramatic wide-angle lenses, and sometimes pristine framings that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wes Anderson film, Lubezki attacks the visual language of Digger with more fun and subtlety than Iñarritu’s heavy-handedness. The Parliament scene, lit with those crackling whites that reminded me of the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, is so interesting it doesn’t even look like this was shot by the same madman who convinced Terrence Malick to make The New World with natural lighting.
There are a million ideas at play in Digger, and though almost all of them land, they don’t amount to an interesting or deep truth. Yes, global warming is killing us all, and the society is inherently stacked against all of us, and those who perpetrated this won’t have their comeuppance, and the world will descend to its downfall, and we’ll adjust and accept it, like we adjusted and accepted our currently reality. Like frogs in boiling water.
The plus: Cruise, Hüller, Plemmons, Ahmed and Stuhlbarg deliver some terrific and generational performances. But this is Lubezki’s film through and through.
The minus: Iñarritu, engulfed by his own hubris.