By M.V. Moorhead
There are large chunks of significant brilliance in Digger, but it’s not the easiest movie to like. It’s a satire of the climate crisis, or rather of society’s refusal to deal with the climate crisis, which I guess is the same thing.
That Digger made it to production at all is something of a curiosity. One theory that might explain its unlikely existence: It was just too attractive to Tom Cruise as yet another sop to his ego. The subtext of the production is what a Herculean task it is – both of acting and of prosthetics and body padding – to make Tom Cruise believable playing a man more or less his actual age.
Cruise plays “Digger” Rockwell, an obscenely rich and powerful oil tycoon rattling around a cheerless mansion full of dead animal trophies. Preoccupied with keeping his decrepit 30-year-old cat Maggie alive, Digger has ignored repeated warnings from his staff about an impending disaster at one of his facilities in Greenland. This results in an apocalyptic threat to northern Europe. The President of the United States (John Goodman) and other bigshots, along with Digger’s long-suffering scientific advisors (led by the excellent Riz Ahmed) gather at the mansion to scream at each other about what to do and who to blame.
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu of Birdman and The Revenant from a script he wrote with Sabina Berman and others, the movie’s strategy is to place a cartoonish version of the sort of person on whom we would blame the climate crisis, and without exonerating him, allow him to confront us with our own complicity. But Inarittuwants to go deeper; the film has a Brechtian – and faintly Wes Anderson-ish – layering to its narrative that keeps us off-balance and challenges our confidence in the structure, but which in the end really does pull together and (mostly) make sense.
It’s a little galling for me to admit this because Inarittu, though clearly talented and visionary, has never been a great favorite of mine. He has a sort of sour, misanthropic streak which, though certainly far from indefensible, still feels like a pose in the context of his splashy, star-studded, award-bait movies.
That said, I think that for all its off-putting aspects, Digger may be Inarittu’s best film. It’s beautifully shot (in muted, pessimistic tones, by Emmanuel Lubezki) and its stylized look and sound are fully immersive. Inarittu even brackets the soundtrack, at the beginning and end, with the croaking and chirping of frogs and insects, as if to suggest that the meek really shall inherit the earth.
Especially in his big, defiant, grandstanding moments, Cruise is very good, in much the same flamboyant way he was in, say, Magnolia. He gives Digger plenty of malignant energy and cocksure, insolent composure, while allowing us just a hint, here and there, of a ravaged, scabbed-over humanity beneath. Goodman’s bellowing commander-in-chief and Ahmed’s fed-up functionary are both great; so are Michael Stuhlbarg as the milquetoast VP and Sandra Huller as Digger’s sister.
The message hanging over this film seems to be: We will never willingly solve this crisis. We’ll keep on consuming fossil fuels, and arguing about the issue, and blaming each other for it, and adapting as best we can for as long as we’re able to weather the havoc it wreaks – including creating ineffectual satires about it like Digger. But we’re too reckless and too selfish, Inarittu seems to be saying, to unify and sacrifice to make it better.
And, quite possibly, he’s right. I wouldn’t bet against it, but I also don’t want to believe it.
