by Josh Rosenberg
Tom Cruise does not perform all that many stunts in Digger. There’s little here that feels like a “Tom Cruise production” (outside of Cruise reportedly torturing his makeup department with a stopwatch to cut down the time it took to apply his prosthetics). No monthslong press tour about how he’s pushing life to the edge for this movie. No IMAX proselytizing—and honestly, we’ve had enough of that already this summer. No jumping off a mountain on a motorcycle. No chance really that he could die making this film.
For a while, that felt like Cruise’s goal. Climb the Burj Khalifa, fly a military jet at Mach 10, jump from one airplane to another. Cruise indoctrinated audiences with the idea that a reason to even go to theaters was to see him risk his life trying to entertain us. If not, why even leave our homes at all?
Well, Digger, surprisingly, has a lot to say about this. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Cruise take a shovel to a story about an oil baron who dooms the planet and then pushes past the bedrock to comment on why we even continue to make movies while the world erupts into chaos. Sadly, much like Mountainhead and Don’t Look Up, this satire takes telling and not showing like it’s a challenge.
It all starts with Digger Rockwell (Cruise), a caricature of an American oil tycoon who spends his mornings nursing his ailing cat Maggie and shooing his bootlicking staff away. He’s moments away from learning about an explosion at his oil rig in Greenland, which sets a glacier the size of a major U.S. city on a collision course toward Europe.
After he hears about the potential death toll from his environmental advisor Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and calls an emergency meeting with the president of the United States (John Goodman), it lands on Digger to explain how to warp the narrative around this natural (yet man-made) disaster. Digger also stars Michael Stuhlbarg as the meek and impish vice president, an underused Sandra Hüller as Digger’s half sister and furious business partner, and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy as his overworked assistant.
Conceptually, Digger is Dr. Strangelove meets Birdman. But it’s really a comedy drama about the old farts who lead us to a global catastrophe that is not all that thrilling or funny. It’s like Iñárritu saw Don’t Look Up and thought it didn’t go far enough. He reckoned it needed more gloom-mongering and more Saturday Night Live–esque cold-open lines. Yet the best joke of the whole film is when people trip over Digger’s dropped shovel.
Include Cruise’s performance as this Les Grossman–meets–Foghorn Leghorn oil magnate in a personal hall of fame if you want—it’s not his fault that Digger feels so incompetent. Somehow, all subtext was lost in the script. In the biggest scene of the film, Digger gives a speech about our overdependence on oil and our willingness to turn the other cheek for the sake of modern convenience that would fit more at home in something like Taylor Sheridan’s Landman. It’s the kind of rant that lands when the characters actually believe the words coming out of their mouths—because a large part of the creative force behind the show does too. With Digger, it’s unbelievable what little Hollywood has learned from all the terrible, ham-fisted doom-parody storytelling before it.
Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s production design is the most entertaining part of the film. How the characters move around Digger’s ornate dollhouse sets is more interesting than what they’re actually doing in them. Composer Cosmo Sheldrake’s score is booming and strange, and I loved the use of water droplets flooding the rooms post-disaster as extra percussive tension.
Goodman is great, as always. He plays a maniacal leader with many similarities to a certain man in office right now. He’s looking to pass the blame to anyone who will take it off him (China, Russia), and he’s more preoccupied with his escalating rectal cancer than with mitigating the damage. Cruise’s character has a bit of Goodman in him as well. And the few entertaining times when they directly play off each other?It’ll help you forget that we learn very little about what kind of man Digger Rockwell is outside of John D. Rockefeller parody #1,567.
Digger should be a fun character. People should dress as Digger for Halloween, and “Fuck the polar bears” should be printed on T-shirts. Instead, Digger feels like Captain Obvious. And no one likes Captain Obvious. So what could have possibly led Cruise to join such a groan-inducing film?
According to the actor, he was simply a fan of Iñárritu’s work after seeing his debut film Amores perros in 2000. The role of Digger Rockwell, Cruise said in interviews leading up to the premiere, was a challenging culmination of his acting skills. It takes a certain talent to play Digger, sure. I’m not sure it had to be Tom Cruise, let alone written at all. But maybe this is just Cruise hunting for a path toward his first Oscar, like when DiCaprio fought bears in Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Or is it possible that Cruise, at age 64, resonates with Digger’s message that his generation has left us utterly without hope for a livable future? That there was no point in risking his life over eight Mission: Impossible films if there aren’t any more generations to enjoy them?
Well, following a twist that occurs about a half hour in, we learn that Digger is more than the movie lets on. I can confirm that it’s not a musical, which rabid social-media sleuths have gravitated toward as a potential theory. I won’t ruin the surprise for you here, though I could, in hopes that you’ll walk away from Digger with just one thing you enjoyed. But when the rug is pulled out from under you, it’s a decent reveal that what you’re watching isn’t all that Digger has to offer.
The real reason I don’t have the answers to my questions is because Digger barely asks them. When the credits roll, the idea that you’ve reconsidered anything about the state of the world for the first time feels impossible. You would have had to have literally been born out of Digger Rockwell’s oil spill and crawled to the theater to watch your first-ever movie for Digger to feel meaningful.
It eventually becomes clear that Iñárritu understands this once the twist sets in. He wants the characters to appear goofy and bombastic on purpose before everything shifts. Still, there isn’t enough of this second element after it’s introduced to sell that Digger is really anything more than what’s already been advertised: Iñárritu’s attempt at the ultimate (and hopefully the last) satire about climate change, designed to put the acting talents of Tom Cruise on a pedestal. But for anyone who’s seen Cruise in Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, or Jerry Maguire, it shouldn’t take Digger for you to open your eyes to anything at all.
