An ego-driven industrialist’s carelessness brings about climate disaster, plus a little more, in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s DIGGER. Led by a fantastic Tom Cruise, the satire is a complexly mixed bag, entertaining but also unsatisfying and muddled.
TW: An elderly animal is in pain, and often used for comic (and satiric) effect. However, it’s clearly a puppet (as it is meant to be) if that helps.
Digger is a film that almost works. Directly: it’s a mess. An ambitious mess with a total go-for-brokenness that I always appreciate. The sheer act of going big gets points. That’s what we get with Alejandro G. Iñárritu. He doesn’t make small movies. He makes spectacles, big swings that hold nothing back in creation and acting on ideas and themes. Even his comparatively smaller breakthrough works, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, contain what makes Birdman: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and The Revenant hit hard: powerful narratives and strong characters within their specific styles. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths missed the mark, falling into self-indulgence. Digger lands somewhere in the middle. I loved the grandeur, complications, and compelling nature. It’s hilarious, with a grand audacity from start to finish. It’s a giant absurdist fable of the current world, but it also fails: the satire is shallow and so direct it gets lost in satirizing the satire; any power it can derive is wasted on self-importance as big as the characters’ egos, leaving it lacking cohesion. In the public sphere, Digger has already proven divisive; and in my private sphere, it’s just as divisive in my own brain and thought process.
For the first half of Digger, scripted (in story and screenplay) by Sabina Berman, Jez Buttewroth, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicholas Giacobone, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, I was totally on board. In an obscenely large mansion, Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell deals with his 30-year-old dying cat, a cat that clearly wants to die, but he’s too selfish to let it happen, working as a metaphor for everything else – how his and other people’s selfishness keep anyone else from their needs; and ignoring everything anyone who actually knows anything has to tell him, whether it be a climate scientist on a rig or Riz Ahmed’s Dr.Ganesh; if it affects the bottom line, it shouldn’t happen. If it has catastrophic effects, it’s someone else’s problem. And it does: an “accident” caused by not listening to the people who need to be heard can explode and easily cascade into a global disaster. But how will it affect his PR and his pocket?
Iñárritu moves the film with insane energy, set to the beat of Birdman, constantly spinning, turning, holding, and crafting an expansive narrative. And it’s often very funny, with the overtop of it all. The timing is generally on point. Everything is larger than life, with a beautiful artificiality and tone that comes from such choices. It’s a clear satire of the rich, powerful, mostly white and male, as purposely pallid and sallow as their souls, not unlike “the idiots are in charge of our continued existence” in Dr. Strangelove, but in the modern era. But it’s also the film’s failing.
The issues really creep in the last half. At some point, Innaruto stops the film cold to state Digger’s thesis directly, without any coating. As if we didn’t already know. It’s pretty clear from the first time Digger Rockwell ignores a climate scientist. That’s the issue. The satire is so direct, it’s toothless. Anyone paying attention knows the world is continually made worse by callow men who care only about putting another dollar in their pocket, using that dollar to fuel their ego and empty lives rather than helping anyone. When the current administration is so far into the truth is stranger than fiction, outdoing the Onion, it makes it incredibly hard to satirize. But that’s it, pointing blame at the easy (and deserving) target and the generations of men like these who have got us here. Digger does no digging (heh); it’s a shallow grave of satire. It’s made worse by its desire to have its cake and eat it too. As it functions as a satire, a shift in the first act also makes Digger a satire of satires, of self-righteous aren’t-we-smart “takedowns,” films like the atrocious Don’t Look Up. The film also makes Digger a satire of satires-of self-righteous aren’t-we-smart “takedowns,” films like the atrocious Don’t Look Up. I’m torn about the twist/shift; on one hand, it allows further exploration of construction, deconstruction, and destruction. On the other hand, it lampshades the film’s own issues. If the main portion of the film is meant to be a treatise against this sort of work, why do we spend so much time in it? I wonder if, at some point, Iñárritu and the screenwriting team realized it wasn’t working as is and changed course to fix and deepen the film. Either way, it doesn’t work, leaving a conflicted mess.
As jumbled, messy, and ultimately nearly a nothing in the plotting and messaging, Digger is a technical marvel. The production design by Dennis Gasner and Richard L. Johnson is wowing and fully engaging. The purely and overdone artificiality, not unlike Lanthimos’s Poor Things and aspects of the also-cribbed Kubrick, and more than a dollop of Wes Anderson, works to an insane degree. Even as I started to sigh at the scripting, the presentation kept drawing me in and engaging me. It’s a twisted, decaying world, and Iñárritu, Gasner, and Johnson lean into it. Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot The Revenant, shot it in VistaVision, working with those production designers to craft a rich, jaw-dropping tableau. It may be one of the visually notable films of this year (though I can’t help but think of the artificiality of Camp Miasma, done on a sliver of Digger’s budget and for better). It’s an incredibly well-done film overall.
No fault of the actors either. Tom Cruise, under a layer of latex like his Tropic Thunder role as Lex Grossman, hasn’t been this good since Magnolia. He’s full caricature, and he works it. The character might be bravado and ego, but I feel none of that from Cruise. Riz Ahmed threatens to steal the film with what might be the most interesting character, at least the most dynamic. John Goodman is just as good screaming his way through the President of the US, with Michael Stuhlbarg getting amazing laughs as the cowardly VP. Loved seeing Robert John Burke in a handful of scene-stealing lines. Great to have Sandra Hüller in her second climate-based movie this year after Project Hail Mary. She had big Catherine O’Hara energy, to the point that at the start I was thinking, “did they deage O’Hara for an uncredited final performance?” Wish we had her more. Emma D’Arcy gets a few bits, as does Lucas Hedges.
Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and written by a slew of folks, is a troubled film. So much worked, made me laugh, and drew me in. But just as much was sanctimonious claptrap that undid the goodwill of the rest. I may need a second viewing to see where I land. Either way, I highly appreciate what Iñárritu is going for, and I will always be drawn to big swings, audacious attempts at something huge.