Tom Cruise Is a Scream—and a Gas—in “Digger”

Save this storySave this storySave this storyDigger Rockwell is a funny name to give an oil tycoon. Like nearly every joke and jab in “Digger,” a doomsday-themed comic fantasia from the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, it feels both on the nose and slightly off, as if the script had started with something more obvious—say, Driller Rockefeller—and then bent it awkwardly sideways. The name carries a rich legacy; over Digger’s mantelpiece hangs a shovel with which his grandfather struck black gold in Texas, in 1917. A scion of no small fortune or influence, Digger is played by an equivalent titan of industry, Tom Cruise, wielding a Southern accent and enjoying an overdue respite from “Mission: Impossible” heroics. Not that the star has left physical bravado by the wayside: he tumbles from a deck at sea and storms off a plane mid-flight. In a particularly Ethan Hunt-ish twist, the actor wears a rubbery disguise—a potbellied suit, a scraggly gray comb-over, and a smattering of old-guy makeup. It may be the craziest stunt Cruise has ever pulled off: at sixty-four, he’s finally acting his age.

A terrible new day is dawning, though Digger, who commands, plunders, and exploits the world’s resources at will, is bound to be shielded from its worst consequences. An early tour of his estate, provided by the swirling camerawork of Emmanuel Lubezki, reveals a catalogue of crimes against the animal kingdom, with antlers and furs festooning every surface. Digger loves his critters, so long as they’re dead or nearly so; his closest companion is an ailing, bedraggled white feline, Maggie, who might be the ugliest movie cat since Mr. Bigglesworth, from the “Austin Powers” franchise. A weird air of unreality persists. Why do the slow-rising curtains in Digger’s bedroom resemble the ruffled drapes adorning a theatrical stage? And why do the pastel skies and misty landscapes outside his window look painterly to the point of artificial? Before we can protest, the plot is upon us. A methane leak at one of Digger’s oil platforms, in the Arctic, has triggered a huge explosion, ripping away a chunk of ice shelf in Greenland. Now a rogue popsicle five times the size of Washington, D.C., may be floating toward northern Europe, spelling an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe that will kill or displace millions of people and cause more than eighteen trillion dollars in property damage.

Someone else might have spun a tense, straight-faced thriller from this premise, which is out there but not, in movie terms, wholly outlandish. (Compared with Roland Emmerich’s “Moonfall,” from 2022, “Digger” is almost a documentary.) But Iñárritu, who co-wrote the film, cares not for taut dramatics, and he has little use, and even less aptitude, for suspense. He’s the most gaseous of Hollywood auteurs, and he has, in a striking confluence of form and content, inflated this methane-fuelled farce with fiery gusts of hot air. The movie is an epic series of harrumphs and harangues, propelled from room to room—and, in time, out into the world beyond the estate—by a spirit of impudent absurdism and corrosive cynicism which seems to emanate from Digger himself. Hearing that several employees have perished in the Greenland blast, Digger thinks only of salvaging his rig. Learning that countless more people will lose their lives on account of his neglect, greed, and stupidity, he is pressed, reluctantly, into a most self-serving mode of damage control.

A circus of bombast ensues, some of it courtesy of the score, by the British composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Digger is lambasted by his half sister, Emma (Sandra Hüller), a superficially liberal-minded Shiv Roy type, with her own eco-friendly initiative. For presence and volume, though, Emma is soon eclipsed by the President of the United States (John Goodman), a bellowing buffoon in a Trump-red tie. He arrives at the Rockwell estate with a gormless Vice-President (Michael Stuhlbarg) and what appears to be an entire Cabinet of Pete Hegseths in tow, all of them praying for God’s mercy one minute and prescribing the “nuke-ular” option another. The lone voice of sanity is Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s head of environmental safety and security, who explains various disaster scenarios, in an elegant cascade of high-tech graphics. In a room full of fascists and fools, Ahmed’s projection of competence—and of the spluttering exasperation that is the lot of the competent—proves a genuine balm.

It falls to Ganesh to address the public, and to lay the blame for the crisis at Digger’s cowboy-booted feet. But the tycoon seeks to turn the tables, and he unleashes a tirade that is insufferable yet enthralling. Staring down an assembly of the outraged, Digger spells out the ruthless logic of global capitalism and claims the world’s fuel dependency as the ultimate vindication. “Oil is what we have. Oil is what God gave us,” he snarls. “You demand, and I supply.” The crowd does not respond favorably, and, in the chaos, someone flings a shoe at Digger—shades of George W. Bush in Iraq. But Cruise’s oratorical frenzy holds you; he hurls himself into the proceedings with unrelenting bellicosity and a bold indifference to the audience’s sympathies. Watching Cruise here, I was reminded of what a good screamer he can be. There was the motivational mansplainer he played in “Magnolia” (1999), not to mention his monstrous Hollywood mogul in “Tropic Thunder” (2008). I also thought of “A Few Good Men” (1992), this time imagining Cruise, not Jack Nicholson, as the belligerent dispenser of truths we can’t handle.

High-wire big-budget filmmaking has become harder to find and tougher to market, and the past several weeks of pre-release speculation have not been kind to “Digger.” Now that Iñárritu’s film is before us, the question arises: Is it a disaster flick or a straight-up disaster? I’d say it’s a comedy of errors, both deliberate and otherwise. He has admittedly set a high bar for himself, stranding us in a barking-mad netherzone between the apocalyptic-farce terrain of “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and the dystopian media satire of “Network” (1976). Other cinematic allusions are a bit more subtly flaunted: the ghostly pallor of the characters’ faces, and of Lubezki’s palette in general, bring to mind the surreally deadpan comedies of Roy Andersson, in which the living already look as if halfway to the grave. Even so, a bracing theatricality persists. Should you happen to notice the poster for John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” (1977) planted on a wall in one shot, you will have made Iñárritu very happy indeed.

On balance, he does seem rather upbeat. “Digger” may wag its finger about climate change, fossil-fuel dependency, and the bottomless corruption and stupidity of our incestuously entwined corporate and political classes. But, for Iñárritu, the wretched state of the world has always been more of a starting point, a baseline narrative assumption, than a determinant or register of mood. And his film, at once proudly unlikable and meticulously realized, is both a daring display of craft and a rude sign of life—which is to say, the opposite of depressing. Iñárritu has retained the visual grandeur of “Bardo,” his quasi-autobiographical folly from 2022, but shaken off the self-mythologizing torpor; gone, too, are the stultifyingly glum metaphysics of “The Revenant” (2015). For reasons that are both obvious and not, the movie of his to which this one harks back the most, conceptually and tonally, is the inside-Broadway comedy “Birdman” (2014). In that film, it’s the show that must go on; in “Digger,” it’s the world.

Unsurprisingly, Iñárritu wrote the film with two of his “Birdman” screenwriters, Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone. (There is also a fourth credited writer, Sabina Berman.) I’d venture that “Digger” is actually a better, more fluid film than “Birdman”—less contrived and constrained in its staging, more mysterious in its intentions and effects. There is, you may have guessed, a hidden formal and structural conceit at work here that—like the identity of a peripheral character, played by Jesse Plemons—I’m loath to say more about. What can’t go unremarked upon, though, is the surpassing wonder of Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s production design, a near-Brechtian marvel of diaphanous screens, rotating parts, and other ingenious devices. Seldom have I encountered a greater disjunction between the bludgeoning overkill of a film’s verbiage and the playful sublimity of its visuals.

Iñárritu’s technique transcends gimmickry. The sense of a continuous, organic form, which he chased so aggressively in “Birdman,” springs to life here in all manner of unintended ways. A shift from one room to the next can suddenly whisk us onto another plane of reality; a change of context can unpack hidden layers in Cruise’s performance, locating a flash of human tenderness beneath Digger’s corrosive self-interest. In the final moments, the virtuosic interplay of camera and scenery transports us into a state of both wonderment and despair; it also gently destabilizes our perception of time and place. We’re left to question, as we wander out of our own theatres and back into the world, whether the apocalypse looms—or if we’ve been living through it all along. ♦

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