Sometimes great movies are complicated movies. But not all complicated movies are great, and some directors can’t distinguish between the act of making a meaningful picture and pulling off an elaborate parlor trick. Digger, the eighth feature film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is pure, empty-headed trickery, a drab-looking gewgaw with a million moving parts and nothing to say, even if it desperately claws at profundity every minute. Greed is evil! Big oil is killing the planet! Human beings are in a pickle! You can believe all these things are true and still find Digger pathetically unpersuasive; it’s so thematically clumsy, even within the ostensible razzle-dazzle of its filmmaking, that it comes off as liberalism’s worst enemy. If human civilization really is nearing its end, assaultive bores like this one aren’t helping.
Tom Cruise, his face nearly unrecognizable beneath cookie-dough prosthetics, plays Texas oil tycoon Digger Rockwell who, as the movie opens, is desperately trying to keep his beloved but bedraggled long-haired emotional-support cat alive. We can see it isn’t a real cat; it’s sort of an animatronic thing, a bit of theatrical engineering, standing in for the real thing. Even so, Digger’s pathetic attachment to this creature is supposed to be funny, or somewhat touching, or something—it’s hard to say what, but we do know that Cruise sure is doing a lot of acting around this limp assemblage of metal, plastic, and faux fur. The ancient thing, barely a plot device, will eventually die and is nearly forgotten.
Meanwhile, Cruise’s Digger pads around his palatial digs in silk PJs and cowboy boots, alternately fulminating and rhapsodizing about nothing in particular, his overwritten eccentricities laid bare for indiscernable reasons. His mansion home is classic old-money-meets-new: tapestries and boars’ heads adorn the walls, and giant picture windows look out upon dreamy gray vistas. Actually, nearly everything in Digger—shot by the enormously gifted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who should perhaps be tested for cataracts—is grayish, from the interiors to the cloud-strewn skies to the characters’ skin. The movie is only pretending to be fun; its antic joylessness will more likely wear you down.
In case you haven’t guessed, Digger is an environmental parable. Early in the picture, Digger receives advance warning of a cataclysmic world event, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. His ruthless quest for oil is the cause of this calamity, but even with his insider knowledge, he does nothing to stop it. Digger’s nervous, well-meaning environmental adviser, played by Riz Ahmed, knows of his boss’s guilt but doesn’t know how to spin it. Later, Digger will face an angry tribunal of world leaders who demand that he explain his actions. He both wows them and angers them with a disarmingly honest speech about how everyone loves oil. It is, after all, the language of freedom. Digger’s point is that Americans specifically, with our need to traverse long distances in our gas-guzzling vehicles, sometimes just to get to the grocery store, are complicit in the sins of big oil, and he’s not wrong. The problem is that he’s so water-is-wet right that his alleged barnburner of a speech is nothing but a scolding rant. It doesn’t so much rev you up as beat you up.
—Warner Bros. PicturesAnother alleged surprise: Digger isn’t real—he’s a character in a play (what we’re seeing is a tech rehearsal), and Cruise is merely playing the actor playing him. Iñárritu is a wily one, all right. With the “reality is just a construct” black comedy Birdman, he (almost) fooled us into believing the whole movie consisted of just one shot. While making The Revenant, he subjected his actors to grueling conditions, presumably thinking that allowing them to nearly freeze to death would make his gritty survival tale more realistic. That approach doesn’t empower actors; it insults them. They're professionals who are being paid to act, not to be brutalized.
Digger was cowritten by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone, from a story by Iñárritu, Berman, and Jez Butterworth, a too-many-cooks equation if ever there were one. The movie has the peculiar distinction of being both all over the place and laser-focused on its dumb premise; too bad there isn’t an Oscar for that. The play-within-a-movie conceit is just an excuse to show off enormous, elaborate sets-within-the-set: One of the massive picture windows in Digger’s mansion becomes a frame for a stand of miniature trees, tended to by stage-hand giants; it's a cool effect—and yet, so what? There are quite a few actors here you’ll recognize, including an ashen-looking John Goodman—he plays the president of the United States, and his chief function is to boom loudly about the “cancer of the asshole” from which he suffers. Jesse Plemons plays a member of the play’s audience, a man with a secret and a very bad haircut, though he has only a few brief scenes. Occasionally, Sandra Hüller drifts through the movie as if searching for another, better picture that might actually give her something to do. For those who enjoy gazing into cavernous nostrils, there are lots of grotesque low-angle closeups. These performers deserve combat pay.
Through the whole of this aggressively unfunny, boneheaded farce, Cruise’s Digger stomps and swaggers, bellows and bloviates. He doesn’t speak his lines, he flings them, like unguided missiles in a cafeteria food fight. The ugly prosthetics are perhaps intended to suggest that Cruise has no vanity—he’s perfectly willing to look older and pudgier than he really is, as long as it proves to everyone once and for all that he’s a great actor as well as just a hugely bankable movie star. But acting to prove a point is the antithesis of acting; the point is to do the job, not advertise what a great job you’re doing. That’s the overarching problem with the movie as well. Iñárritu and his star aren’t telling us a story; they’re selling us, relentlessly, on the genius of the movie they’ve made. This is reverse-engineered awards bait, a movie that insists it’s digging for the truth, when all it’s really doing is shoveling.
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