Under heavy prosthetics, Tom Cruise turns an oil tycoon into the year’s most thrilling provocation.
Digger is the most audacious studio movie of the year, and the opening line of this Digger movie review is a simple one: I loved it. Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s apocalyptic satire, which Warner Bros. opens in theaters this Friday, October 2, is loud, enormous, furious and very funny. It is also, at the center, the wildest Tom Cruise performance in a quarter century. Some people are going to hate it. That seems to be the point.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil baron named for the shovel his granddaddy used to dig up the family fortune. He is a walking monument to excess. He wears cowboy boots, ten-gallon hats and bolo ties. He carries a paunch built from silicone and a Texas drawl you could pour over pancakes. He has a mansion stuffed with hunting trophies, a half-blind house cat he loves more than any human being, and a direct line to the president of the United States.
Cruise is almost unrecognizable under the prosthetics, and that is the first pleasure of the film. The most famous face in the world disappears, and what replaces it is a cartoon of American appetite, all bluster and bravado. It is the kind of swing Cruise has not taken since Magnolia, and it reminds you how dangerous he can be when he stops protecting his image.
The plot kicks in by video call. Digger’s head of environmental security reaches him from an Arctic oil field with news he does not want to hear. Methane bubbling up from the ocean floor beneath his drilling operation has cracked a glacier. Then the rig explodes, a massive ice shelf breaks loose, and it starts drifting toward Europe, where scientists predict a tsunami that could displace millions.
Digger’s first worry is the rig. His second is the headline. The disaster, it turns out, is one his family has known was coming for decades and has spent a fortune keeping quiet. “CO2 is just the fuse,” someone says. “Methane is the bomb.”
From there, Digger becomes a pitch-black comedy about power, panic and public relations. Digger summons President Compson (John Goodman, gloriously loud) and his cabinet to the mansion to get ahead of the story. Robert John Burke’s Colonel Fitzgerald, the defense secretary, wants to bomb the iceberg in a performance that tips its hat to George C. Scott. And Riz Ahmed‘s Ganesh, a scientist with the nerve to tell the truth, keeps explaining why every macho solution will only make things worse.
The Dr. Strangelove comparison is obvious, and Inarritu invites it. But where Kubrick’s war room was cold, Digger runs hot. It is a movie of shouting men in beautiful rooms, and the joke is how little any of the shouting matters. Everyone in power is performing. Everyone is managing the narrative. Nobody is actually stopping the ice.
Inarritu has always liked to tell you that you are watching a movie, and he does it here with real mischief. A curtain rises on a proscenium stage. A poster for John Cassavetes’ Opening Night lingers on screen. The cat, it becomes clear, is a puppet, and a slightly ratty one.
These are clues, and they pay off in a twist I will not spoil. It reframes everything you have seen and turns much of the cast into double agents of a sort. It is the kind of turn that will split audiences down the middle. I found it thrilling, because it turns a satire about climate denial into a film about the stories we tell ourselves to avoid looking at the truth.
Then there is the speech. Midway through, Digger addresses the European Parliament in a chamber built to look like the Roman Senate. The continent he has put in danger wants his head. Instead of apologizing, he takes the blame, all of it, and then hands it right back.
“Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth”
He tells them, and everyone in that room has been drinking it. It is a long, rolling, thunderous monologue, and Cruise is extraordinary in it, charming, combative and genuinely frightening at once. It is one of the best scenes he has ever played.
That scene is the key to the whole film. Digger is not interested in letting anyone off the hook, and that includes the audience. It is a movie about a monster who keeps insisting he is just giving us what we want. The most unsettling thing about it is how convincing he is.
Inarritu wrote the film with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone and Sabina Berman, and the dialogue has the same caffeinated, show-off rhythm as their work on Birdman. The jokes come fast and often land as accusations. Not all of them work, and the movie is happy to be too much. But the energy never flags, and the sheer nerve of it becomes its own kind of entertainment.
The ensemble is stacked. Goodman plays the president as a bellowing toddler, and he is very funny. Ahmed is the film’s conscience, and his quiet, steady performance gives Digger the human weight it needs. Sandra Huller plays Digger’s younger sister, Emma, one of the few people willing to fight him, and she matches his volume blow for blow.
Emma D’Arcy brings a dry, watchful calm to Lina, his assistant. Michael Stuhlbarg is sly as the vice president, and Jesse Plemons turns up as the owner of a global intelligence firm whose role comes into focus late.
The film looks spectacular. Inarritu reunites with Emmanuel Lubezki, his cinematographer on Birdman and The Revenant, and they shoot it in VistaVision, which gives every frame an epic, almost classical grandeur. The production design by Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson is a feast, from Digger’s palatial mansion to the ice fields to the marble halls where the powerful pretend to be in charge. This is a movie made for the biggest screen you can find, and IMAX audiences are in for a show.
Is Digger subtle? Not for a second. It is a movie that would rather hit you over the head than tap you on the shoulder, and its message about the planet is delivered with the volume turned all the way up. But that is also what makes it so alive. In an era of cautious, focus-grouped studio filmmaking, here is a nine-figure movie that is genuinely angry about something and unafraid to say so.
It is also worth saying how rare this kind of risk is for Cruise. For more than a decade, he has been the most reliable action star in the world, the man who hangs off airplanes so audiences do not have to. Digger asks him to be ugly, loud and morally repellent, and he dives in without a safety net. The result is a performance that is funny, grotesque and, in the end, strangely moving. When the bluster finally cracks, there is something terrified underneath it.
Inarritu has made bold films before, and some of them have tipped into self-regard. Digger has moments where it seems very pleased with its own cleverness. But the ambition here feels earned. This is a filmmaker swinging for the fences with a movie star who is willing to swing with him, and the collision is as exhilarating as anything in theaters this fall.
Some viewers will walk out. Others will walk out arguing. That is exactly the conversation Digger is built to start, and it may be the most valuable thing a movie like this can do. It is audacious, abrasive, gorgeous and alive. Go see it on the biggest screen possible, and then go argue about it.
RATING: ★★★★☆
That’s a Wrap | Digger
“Audacious, abrasive, gorgeous and alive, with the wildest Tom Cruise performance in a quarter century.”
Jonathan P. Moustakas
Watch The Digger Trailer Below:
CREDITS
Director: Alejandro G. Inarritu
Screenwriters: Alejandro G. Inarritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone, Sabina Berman
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Robert John Burke
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production Design: Dennis Gassner, Richard Johnson
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: Rated R
Runtime: 2 hours 9 minutes
