What could have possibly compelled Tom Cruise — one of Hollywood’s most bankable A-list actors — to leave the comfort of franchise filmmaking, don a fat suit with heavy prosthetics and star in one of the strangest studio movies in decades? We may never know; but I, for one, am ecstatic about it.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger is a beguiling and oftentimes jaw-dropping cinematic experience that flies in the face of mainstream moviemaking. On its surface, it’s a satire about a global disaster and the wealthy elites behind it, but it’s also about humanity’s desire to make meaning during seemingly meaningless times.
In other words, there’s a lot more to Digger than meets the eye, and that’s especially true for the movie’s main character, a brash oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, played by Cruise with over-the-top theatricality. Digger is less a character portrait and more a caricature, with Cruise embodying the balding, beer-bellied oilman with the subtlety of a sledgehammer (or, rather, a shovel). But trust me when I say that’s all by design.
Digger takes on many forms throughout its runtime, but most of it plays out like a modern-day retelling of the Stanley Kubrick comedy Dr. Strangelove. Rockwell is joined by a coterie of government elites, headed by a terminally ill, butthurt president played by a howlingly funny John Goodman. Together, these power-hungry men must confront a catastrophe of their own making, and the results, like Kubrick’s Cold War classic, are darkly comic and brazenly bizarre.
The film’s strangeness is only amplified by its highly stylized production design, which matches the theatrics of the performances with intentionally artificial sets and world-building. The effect is similar to the dollhouse aesthetic seen in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie or the films of Wes Anderson, but Iñárritu adds a layer of surrealism all his own. Iñárritu’s long-time cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki also lends his unmatched eye to the film, combining the winding long takes of Birdman with the immersive, natural lighting of The Revenant.
Unsurprisingly, given its odd tone and experimental nature, Digger has failed to connect with audiences, resulting in some of the lowest box office returns in Cruise’s career. It’s also sharply divided critics, with some calling the film a pretentious mess and others labeling it a misunderstood masterpiece. I happen to fall in the latter camp.
It may sound like hyperbole, but I consider Digger to be nothing less than a reinvention of modern cinema. It’s an arthouse film barely balancing on a blockbuster budget, its ideas too confrontational, too messy, too weird for mass consumption. We’ll probably never see a movie quite like it again — certainly not at this scale — and Cruise will no doubt retreat to the warm embrace of never-ending franchises and legacy sequels.
Nevertheless, Digger will stand the test of time. By excavating the real-world effect of satire for both the powerful and powerless, Digger proves to be a deceptively deep work of art about the work of art.
