‘Digger’: A Movie That Was Very Committed To Whatever It Was
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SPOILER ALERT: This article includes specific details about the film Digger.
When we first see Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell in his slovenly glory, he is in his bed next to a zombie cat that is lying in its own puddle of piss. The thing is, this cat, along with the view from his window, feels and looks wildly artificial.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger falls in line with an interesting trend of movies about “performance” that have been hitting theaters as of late — many of which are award season contenders: The Debut directed by Jesse Eisenberg, Elsinore directed by Simon Stone, and even Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra is about an unfinished play. There’s also Giselle Bonilla’s buzzy The Musical, which debuted at Sundance. It stars Will Brill as a drama teacher who puts on a musical about 9/11 as a form of revenge against his ex (Gillian Jacobs), who is dating their boss (Rob Lowe). You can argue that the Chris Rock-directed Misty Green starring Rosalind Eleazar as a struggling successful in a flailing contemporary Hollywood landscape.
That’s the most exciting twist about Digger: it’s a play within a movie. And once that novelty wears off. You ask yourself, “What are we even doing here?”
The Digger discourse has been quite a joy to sit through because everyone thinks they are right. The people who hate it, really hate it. The people who love it really love it.
I prefer to start a new camp. The “I don’t need to watch it again” camp.
Digger is a fun moviegoing experience. It’s a very committed movie with a strong point of view. Iñárritu never fails to have fun sculpting a universe out of a mound of clay and throwing caution to the wind. He always has something to say, and it is flashy, bombastic, and dripping with passion.
Digger crash lands and thinks it’s doing more than it really is. It’s a scrapbook of modern day themes of greed and power, half-baked cinematic ideas, and great acting that is posing as cinema — but is it bad that I kind of enjoyed it?
Iñárritu gives us something to sink our teeth into, but it’s just not quite substantial, impressive, and very showy, which is kind of why it’s fun but not necessarily a good movie. I mean, this is from the same man who brought us Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Yes, he has range, but Digger felt like an anomaly to me.
There are very clever things about it (loved the play’s name: Fossil Fools), and its blatant skewering of white oligarchs and lack of women in film was very “woke”. It’s a film that feels like it’s saying “OMG, Greta Thunberg is really gonna love this!”
The film likes to pat itself on the back with that kind of stuff. And while its cautionary tale of climate change is very much appreciated, it just all became so eye-roll-worthy and heavy-handed.
The film is clearly the Tom Cruise show. But when is it NOT the Tom Cruise show? He will put all his soul into it. All opinions aside, he is, without a doubt, a modern-day movie star. If aliens came from outer space and I had to define a movie star to them, I would say: Tom Cruise.
It was great seeing him outside of a Mission: Impossible movie and getting back into Magnolia or Eyes Wide Shut form — or something in that area. Cruise goes all in with Digger and is an exceptional, scenery-devouring performance in a movie I don’t want to watch again. He actually thinks he is an actor named Curtis Markson portraying an oil tycoon billionaire, Digger Rockwell, in a play titled Fossil Fools in a future where the air on the Earth has become unbreathable, and cities are flooded.
But I found these supporting actors more interesting and captivating: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, and a shoehorned-in Jesse Plemons, who played well with Cruise. It made me wonder if a different lead would have made for a movie that I would watch again.
Iñárritu has perspective and cinematic literacy, two endangered characteristics that I value even if it is done with a heavy hand. I’m not mad at it.
As of the publishing of this review, Digger has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 52%. I will also give it a “rotten” because it certainly is not “fresh”. Again, that does not mean I hated it. It’s a fun moviegoing experience. It’s just not a good movie. Digger is audacious, and it doesn’t give a fuck. It has an arrogance that works for and against it.
Digger is a mess — but a fun mess. It’s one of those movies that I love to see people argue about.
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