REEL | Staging 'Digger' – Tom Cruise Digs Deep and Deeper

"Digger's gonna dig us out!"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Aging movie star Tom Cruise, nearly unrecognizable in a smattering of old-age prosthetics and heavy makeup, alongside pretentious Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu, collaborate for the big-budget satirical black comedy Digger. As a political farce in the mould of Dr. Strangelove, its murky and messy commentary on our contemporary global climate change crisis feels mild at best and severely misguided at worst.

Starring a killer supporting cast led by a sensational Riz Ahmed as the stooge, John Goodman as the dictator, Sandra Hüller as the sister, and Jesse Plemons as the producer, much has been made about what Digger is actually about. While there is indeed an important narrative conceit not revealed anywhere in the film's marketing. Within the film's actual structure, it's laid out plainly in the (terrible and inexplicably catcentric) first act rather than as some sort of shocking twist. This makes the film far more interesting and modulates Cruise's larger-than-life performance, going full Less Grossman as the blowhard billionaire Texas oil tycoon who sacrifices most of Northern Europe purely for profits.

Its script, credited to five separate screenwriters, including Iñárritu and his Birdman co-writers, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Nicolás Giacobone, is ultimately a gloriously messy mishmash of broadly satirical ideas. Imagine watching a Wes Anderson movie and wanting to make a $160 million exploration of its detailed filmmaking and storytelling artifice—lensed spectacularly by three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on VistaVision 35mm film.

Digger is ultimately about the unreality of our contemporary satirical world headed for catastrophic disaster, envisioned through the vessel of Cruise's movie star persona as conceived by one of our most pretentious and unfortunately talented filmmakers, unmoored from any sense of commercial appeal. It's a giant, post-modern misfire of consequential ambition told as an unmoored piece of risk-taking but artificial art. It needs to be seen and discussed forever.


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