There is a lot of yelling in Digger. Chief yeller is our star, Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), a good ol’ boy oil baron who yells when he doesn’t get what he wants—which is certainly the case here, as he’s just discovered that his oil tanker in Greenland has set off a possible global catastrophe. Cruise, with a straggly gray combover, a paunch, and a pound of prosthetics, is actually great in this role: Funny, bellicose, narcissistic—but somehow never quite unlikable. Cruise demonstrates his true movie star chops here, establishing once and for all that it was never just about the million-dollar grin and the all-American handsomeness; the man really does command a screen.
If only Cruise were the only one yelling in Digger. But he has partners in volume: Sandra Hüller as his sister, Ellen, who owns an oxymoron: a “green” oil company that has been bought up by Digger. (Hüller, one of our most gifted actresses, has never given anything close to a bad performance. There’s a first time for everything.) Michael Stuhlbarg, as a fretful U.S. vice president, yells—generally out of fear. And then there’s John Goodman, playing the president, who happens to be dying of “cancer of the ass,” as he repeatedly informs us, who does the most yelling of them all.
The director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is wearing his influences on his sleeve here. The orderly, drolly funny sets and a mid-film plot twist (more on that in a bit) feel cribbed from Wes Anderson; the puffed up idiots in charge feel like Stanley Kubrick, and perhaps a touch of Terry Gilliam. The characters he creates are supposed to be over-the-top, grotesque— but I found the whole thing a bit exhausting. Vulgarity can come in many different forms. It doesn’t always have to go to eleven.
Indeed, if it weren’t for Cruise’s bravura and Riz Ahmed as the mild-mannered (hooray!) environmental scientist Ganesh, who is perhaps too stunned by the impending global disaster to raise is voice, a lot of the film’s first 40 minutes or so would be unbearable.
But then something is revealed that changes our perspective on what we are watching. Spoilers ahead so stop reading here if you want to go into the film cold.
Everything we’re seeing on screen is in fact a play—or a tech dress rehearsal for a play they’ll be doing tonight. (Props to the internet sleuths who guessed Digger was a musical. They were close!) This revelation is a bit absurd—even with a James Cameron-level budget, they wouldn’t be able to pull off the elaborate, ever-changing sets. But it is an interesting wrinkle. Suddenly, we’re meant to ask: Was all that overacting intentional? Cruise, now playing the actor Curtis Markson, certainly thinks so. He complains that some of the dialogue is too much. He’s also a bit frantic because his daughter is flying in from Jamaica to see the show and her plane has gone off the radar (there have been terrible storms). We also meet Kenny (Jesse Plemons), one of the show’s mysterious producers, with a haircut that answers the question “what if Anton Chigurth was a ginger?” and offers to help Markson find his daughter.
But then Iñárritu takes us right back into the action of the “play”—which is a bit jarring at first. The artifice of it all becomes even more glaring—how are we supposed to get lost in the story? Still, powered by Cruise and a few splendid set pieces—one involving Digger addressing a European assembly and giving his version of Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” speech from A Few Good Man, this time in relation to crude oil (cinephile Iñárritu knew exactly what he was doing there)—it manages to be watchable.
And then, gird your loins, there is yet another twist that I won’t spell out here but that does bring the disparate pieces together in an intriguing way. Suddenly, the purpose of this meta structure is revealed and it’s clear the film has a lot on its mind—not just the powerful oil fascists who feel they have God-like power to ruin the planet but about our desire to consume the kind of cathartic work of art that shows these bad guys getting their just desserts. Nothing changes. We laugh and point at their ridiculousness and feel better about ourselves. And the world continues to burn.
Still, what can be said about a film that doesn’t reveal its true intentions until the final act? Is it worth slogging through to get there? I think maybe…yes? I spent a lot of Digger waiting for it end and now I actually want to see it again. Well played, Iñárritu. Well played.