Digger

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger might be the most self-serious unserious film I’ve seen in recent memory. Ostentatious sets, unsubtle acting punctuated by facial tics, and a score (by Cosmo Sheldrake) that underlines nearly every emotion: the film rarely looks like the finest hour of its star-studded team. Then, about a third into the 129-minute film, Inarritu reveals his conceit: what we’ve been watching is a rehearsal of a play called Fossil Fools, supposed to premiere later in the day. Built around greedy fossil fuel baron Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), who [in the film’s world] triggered an apocalypse with his reckless extraction rigs in Greenland and Alaska, Inarritu’s film admits to be aiming for a deliberately underwhelming play. Its lead, Curtis Markson (Cruise, the actor playing Digger) says he feels “disconnected” with the play. However, Digger also commits the cardinal sin of supplementing the play with a film that has frustratingly little to add to modern discourse. As a result, the over-the-top play begins to look like an excuse for a shoddy film.

In the run-up to Digger’s release, a stray theory caught on that Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film might be a stealth musical. It was a sizeable enough rumour that the studio actually issued a disclaimer that it wasn’t. I was reminded of this at the end of an elaborate sequence, the centrepiece of the film in many ways, in which oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) is addressing a European Parliament of sorts. He starts off conciliatory and ends up combative, enraging his audience to the point that they stop yelling and start singing “blah blah blah blah blah”.

I must confess, it took me some time to wrap my head around Iñárritu’s new offering, Digger — but I was glad it gave me considerable food for thought. As far as ambition goes, it is audacious — few films even dare to aim this high, let alone pull it off. On the flip side, it doesn’t come off perfectly as intended. Iñárritu’s screenplay digs deep, but then has trouble getting out of the hole it has dug.

With Digger, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, a multiple Oscar winner (it was five at last count), once again ventures into the territory he is known for — his visceral, psychological filmmaking style exploring gritty realism and raw emotional vulnerability, painful existentialism, all-out redemption, interlinked fates and sweeping stakes. In Digger, he has Tom Cruise for company, with the two taking a wild swing that veers dangerously between ambitious and outlandish. The time is right, more than ever, for a satire on climate change, but Digger is too overstuffed and oddball (not in a good way) to make an impression with lasting impact.

Digger is as depleting as films can get. Watching it is like being flogged mercilessly by its spitfire of self-aggrandising attitudes, a battery of dead metaphors. Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a self-indulgent filmmaker of some other bizarre dimension altogether. This isn’t a complaint. When an artist is as self-absorbed and thrilled by the import of their own statements and themes, it’s the ultimate act of inciting profound annoyance. It wants to say something about the dire state of the world, how we cope with the ever-increasing assault of horrors, the lavish, careless games of the uber-rich casually plunging civilisation into utter chaos. Is satire the only way to find some sort of release from the dread capitalism has forced upon the planet? Is it an evasion or the only honest, fitting response to grief and rage? All are welcome anxieties to examine. But Digger ploughs on and on with the kind of inflated self-regard that instantly spells doom for any undertaking. The final nail in the coffin is the coup casting of Tom Cruise.

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aging American oil tycoon, lives in an isolated mansion with his ailing white cat. Accustomed to getting his way and surrounded by people too afraid to disappoint him, Digger is not easily rattled. However, when the consequences of his reckless actions in Greenland threaten to unleash a climate catastrophe across Northern Europe, he is forced to confront a crisis of his own making. With the help of Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and the President of the United States, Digger must race against time to contain the damage and halt the unfolding disaster. But can a man who spent his life exploiting the planet and people, find a way to save it?

Oscar-winning director Alejandro G Iñárritu’s latest film Digger strips Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise of all the frills and presents him in one of the actor’s most experimental films to date. In recent years, the audience has witnessed Cruise perform death-defying stunts in action thrillers. The man who, in innumerable films, refused to age and gave actors half his age a major complex by performing risky stunts, ages and how in Digger plays a character who is self-aware of his misdeeds and even wants to come clean. Buried under heavy prosthetics, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon in Iñárritu’s climactic satire, which talks of power and politics and how it influences society at large. The satire, while highlighting some pertinent issues, is also indulgent with its storytelling, making Digger a very complex film which is not palatable for regular film watchers.