Digger Review: Tom Cruise Attempts Kubrickian Satire in Bold, Uneven Swing

If you’re of a certain age, it is easy to miss the Tom Cruise of yesteryear who defined his career by the daring risks he would take with auteurs as much those safe studio bets. Sure, he still made Maverick clones like Days of Thunder (Top Gun at Daytona) and Cocktail (Top Gun at TGI Fridays), but he also worked with Oliver Stone on Born on the Fourth of July, Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia, Neil Jordan via Interview with the Vampire, and of course Stanley Kubrick during the grueling 18-month shoot of Eyes Wide Shut.

I think it’s fair to say Cruise, even at the peak of his King of Blockbuster Cinema stardom from the past decade, misses that guy too. It’s the best way to explain Digger, an absolute swing past the fences, beyond the bleachers on the other side of the fences, and toward a goalpost somewhere in the next time zone. A film co-written and solely directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger unapologetically leans on its Kubrickian influences, channeling the scathing, blood-in-its-mouth satire of Dr. Strangelove with the meticulous production design and (seemingly) natural lighting of Barry Lyndon. It’s a film so bold, so bombastic that its on-the-nose venom can only be countenanced due to, like Strangelove, it seeks to be merrily laughing on its way to hell—in this case courtesy of climate change instead of nuclear holocaust.

Yet unlike Strangelove or Cruise’s previous Lord of Childwickbury collaborator, Digger has both more and somehow less on its mind than a previous ode to learning to love our impending doom. To be sure, this is a satire so heightened that it reaches the altitude of one of Cruise’s HALO jumps; it’s a positively rage-filled and rage-inducing sendup of the energy barons in the U.S. and a global economic system addicted to crude oil like it’s the spice melange. But it’s also the first non-Netflix feature from Iñárritu since the one-two Best Director punch of Birdman and The Revenant in the 2010s. And like those movies, particularly Birdman, it seems fixated on the meta appeals and ironies that spring from a person widely celebrated as  “the last movie star,” and now considered a veritable statesman for Hollywood, inhabiting an intentionally broad, deliberately boorish embodiment of American greed and power-consumption.

This is most overt after several SEISMIC twists that redefine the scope of the movie’s ambitions, and the meat of its greatest triumphs and follies. Alas, I cannot write about those wild, almost hallucinatory elements except in the abstract. So suffice to say, imagine if instead of turning Dr. Strangelove into solely a punchline about the superpowers’ lust for armament and annihilation, Kubrick somehow made that film also a backdoor allegory on how Peter Sellers developed that outrageous German accent as the titular Nazi scientist and practiced the smile and left arm’s naughty Sieg Heil-ing salute. It’s still about how he came to love the bomb but also an indictment on the limits of such pithy gallows humor in the face of manmade apocalypse.

In the broadest sense, each successive twist in this vein is revealed as Digger drills ever further down, one layer of narrative artifice at a time, all while staying committed to doing a jaunty spoof about oil executives and complicit governments bringing about the end of the world. I wouldn’t say the ulterior instincts are mistaken, or even lesser, but smashing together these two (or three) narrative sediments and attempting to tell each of them with an earnest, if not imperious, request for applause undermines all levels until, like a deadly shelf of ice the size of multiple American cities, the whole thing starts to crack under the pressure of its own pretensions.

Of the elements I can most freely describe, the movie is about an oil man named Digger Rockwell, a third or fourth generation tycoon so blue-blooded that his austere, Yosemite-chic mansion is lit in a perpetual dreary morning-gray overcast by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Still, it doesn’t make all the dead animal heads and guns on the walls, floors, and even ceilings look any less garish. It’s from this taxidermist paradise ol’ Digger runs the world, keeping the President of the United States (John Goodman) and attendant handlers and Cabinet secretaries waiting downstairs, and telling the eggheads on his Zoom calls, where they complain about safety concerns, to put a cork in it while the oil flows.

Unfortunately on the morning we meet the rascally billionaire, those unstoppable commands meet an immovable rock—or rather a quite rapidly moving ice shelf that has broken off a glacier in Greenland and is expected to make landfall with accompanying tidal waves in about three days. The ailing, mortality-obsessed president wants to pass the buck to Digger, the president’s men want Digger’s chief scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) to come up with a miracle solution when bombing the ice shelf proves futile, and Digger… he just wants to find a loophole in the crisis he can exploit for financial gain. It is, after all, the American way. More pressing for our hero, though, is that no one is able to do anything for his cancer-ridden, comically-obvious animatronic cat!

The artificiality and theatricality of Digger’s End Times scenario, and pussycat, is of course the point. In a world where titans of industries and the winners of real-life Monopoly command, own, and even have patented the technology of the spotlight, all the rest is just a stage for their indulgences and eccentricities, with anyone earning less than 10-figures relegated to the invisible audience in the dark. In this context, Digger is the ultimate diva, and Cruise plays most of his scenes like he’s feasting on a Texas-smoked solo aria. He kicks, he grins, he finger-bangs, and he spits while raving. Some might be reminded of the similarly crude Hollywood caricature Cruise played in Tropic Thunder, but that was done with peculiar affection for his hometown’s line of work.

Digger Rockwell is essayed with leering disdain where the archness is intended to belie the emptiness of the man. The movie offers a pittance of humanity due to his doting concern over a cat that clearly has three paws in the grave, but the obvious unreality of the feline’s on-screen, robotic visage speaks to the realer antipathy the film and actor offer their antihero: he’s a devil who can tap into Cruise’s bottomless charisma, as best demonstrated in a bravado sequence where Digger stands before the eyes of the Hague and world to equally invite their scorn and desperate pleas for liquid black gold. We’re more expected to shudder at and maybe enjoy his folksy rottenness, but we never empathize. Or laugh.

It is an unhinged and liberating performance for Cruise, and yet perhaps the most damning thing about it comes when another character observes, “but it isn’t funny.” Indeed, it’s not, and this articulation draws attention to the gaping hole in the satire; there is an obvious logic to this choice, hence the on-screen admission, but it still cannot paper over what becomes one of the movie’s significant deficiencies. For a film so desperate to posture as a comedy, there is too much didactic anger, and even more smug self-satisfaction, for this basic objective to be fulfilled: it fails at being funny, and thus there is little catharsis in its doom prophesying.

The cartoonish atmosphere doesn’t even work across all performances. While some of the other actors, particularly Ahmed as the guilt-ridden and complicit scientist who took big oil’s money, get the assignment and find chuckles in the margins, great actors like Sandra Hüller as Digger’s half-sister and even Goodman seem adrift in the tonal chaos. Cruise’s archness is never less than hypnotic, but there is a lack of harmony wherein each performer seems to be in a different key, and all are hampered by a screenplay by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone that gets distracted with every possible rabbit hole in sight.

There is, again, a metatextual double-meaning to most of what occurs in the film, and the final shot that carries on past the closing credits seems to be the moment Iñárritu’s entire premise was built around. It really is a magnificent denouement that almost makes the whole picture worth it, but even right before this mic drop, the script still lacks confidence in the audience fully getting it, hence a character played by Jesse Plemons having the unenviable task of spelling out the thesis moments earlier. It’s just ham-fisted enough to possibly get an Oscar-nomination for the writing.

It gives me no pleasure to come down on a picture so rife with audacity and so singularly Iñárritu. The fact a major studio took such a pricey gamble on this material, with no less than Cruise still radiant in his post-Top Gun: Maverick afterglow using it as an opportunity to get under the latex and back to his character actor muses, makes the thing never less than watchable. Even its mistakes are fascinating.

But like a previous protagonist Iñárritu has admitted to being a kind of alter-ego, Riggan Thompson in Birdman, his film becomes so preoccupied with the affectations of art, and the burdens of commentary, that the piece loses sight of whatever it is actually trying to say beneath the deafening insistence of its own self-importance. It becomes so bedazzled with navel-gazing at that statement, and how its commenting on climate change and the power of art to save the world (or not), that it forgets the statement must still work as anything more than a self-flagellating valediction from a movie star. It definitely makes for quite the sight, but Cruise’s return to artistic gambles deserved a better payout.

Digger is in theaters on Friday, Oct. 2.