"DIGGER" - REVIEW

Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has cojones.

His cinema is stylish, bold and confrontational, from the realistic gritty triptychs that were AMORES PERROS, 21 GRAMS, BABEL and BIUTIFUL to the more formally polished, surrealistic but no less innately harrowing back-to-back Best Director Oscar winners BIRDMAN: THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE, THE REVENANT, as well as BARDO: FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS for Netflix (my favorite of the bunch). Whether his resources be large or modest, Iñárritu is a confident, arrogant showman. Each of his films is more ambitious than the last. Like Paul Thomas Anderson and unlike the other two amigos in his cohort (Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón), his films are all R-rated stories for adults. If you revisit his films, it’s often because they’ve had an opportunity to work on you. If you don’t (and I think he would disagree), it’s because he scared you away with his prickly curiosity and his chaotic intelligence; by his need to communicate his heaping handful of truths, and to make sure you get it.

Well, Iñárritu takes his biggest swing yet with a Tom Cruise performance art piece. On a Tom Cruise budget. With none of Tom Cruise’s commercial concerns. 

The concerns of DIGGER, a righteously angry, deeply cynical satire/event movie hybrid, are much bigger. The new film isn’t so much a cautionary tale as it might be an inevitability tale. Sorta.

Cruise plays—nay, is—nay, plays— Digger Rockwell, an old-fashioned oil tycoon living in the modern age (under terrific elderly prosthetics by the great Kazu Hiro) with all the decadence of the American dream. He also has politicians in his back pocket, like the ailing President Compson (the great John Goodman in his broadest performance since THE BIG LEBOWSKI) and his brainless, weak-willed stooge of a VP (Michael Stuhlbarg); a no-nonsense sister/conscience (Sandra Hüller, PROJECT HAIL MARY) with aspirations to start a Digger-funded green energy company; a parade of yes-men that better keep saying yes to keep their jobs; a sickly cat long past its ninth life named Maggie… and a team of climate scientists (led by Riz Ahmed, the film’s MVP) trying to reason with their Southern-twanged blowhard trillionaire boss that his Antarctic drilling operation has released a massive ice shelf that will obliterate northern Europe. Additionally, this is a problem that Digger has willfully ignored for years, as methane gas has been unearthed from beneath the melting permafrost, causing deadly explosions (“CO₂ is the fuse. Methane is the bomb”).

As the ass-cancer-ridden president, complete with a blue suit and a red tie (subtle!) bellows, “Digger got us into this mess, and Digger’s gonna dig us out!”

DIGGER is a more-impressive-than-funny capital-C comedy that will most certainly divide movie audiences but, given a twist that is not being marketed, might someday help the film be considered as ahead of its time. While it owes much to Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE in its conception, DIGGER is not that. Whether you think the film works or not, it works mechanically on multiple levels (which I won’t get into, because you’ll either be down for it or you won’t). It’s a movie that I believe many people will absolutely hate, but for me, there was lots to love, the least of which being an absolutely committed nutso Tom Cruise performance. The words “his best since MAGNOLIA” are being bandied about. I personally wouldn’t go that far, because Cruise explored depths in that film that have never been revisited in other performances before or since. His best since TROPIC THUNDER? That is perhaps a more apt but obvious comparison, given the heavy prosthetics and theatricality. What Cruise is doing here is layered and fascinating in a way that plays a bit into his movie star mythos, given the character’s intensity, and shares a long lineage of Cruise performances in which he’s always at his best when his back is up against the wall, but also… well, I just can’t say. 

The whole cast, which also includes the sly, stone-faced Robert John Burke and Jesse Plemons, is uniformly excellent, and it is a damn miracle that much of Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson’s outlandishly opulent scenery remains intact based on the ferocity with which the actors chew it. Those tough, gamey monologues and rapid dialogue—often shouted at us— comes courtesy of a lot of voices: Iñárritu co-wrote the screenplay with BIRDMAN collaborators Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, along with Sabine Berman, a Mexican journalist and playwright (Berman also co-wrote the story with Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth). Costume designer Jacqueline West complements the ashen-porcelain aesthetic beautifully, and it’s all captured on 35mm in glorious wide-angle VistaVision cinematography by the great Emmanuel Lubeszki. The pallid desaturation is truly by design (and not the presumed modern complaint of low-contrast found in a lot of digital cinematography), to amplify the lifelessness on display, which culminates in a tour de force Cruise monologue which condemns everyone who uses oil and continues to use oil despite the consequences so that they can bask “in the comfort of their unsustainable lives.“

Where does that leave the film ultimately?  Again, people will no doubt hate this. But as Iñárritu is known to do, his comedic bludgeon of a film may annoy you into liking it. If the film is a box office disaster, as it is tracking to become, the disaster will not affect Cruise’s career. Heck, it may not even affect Iñárritu’s. Its brave studio, Warner Bros.—who I’ve always admired as “the director’s studio“ that lets passionate filmmakers explore big ideas that are risky and perhaps uncommercial— is now part of the Paramount family, so time will tell what kind of films WB gets to make in the future, and especially if the success or failure of this one has any bearing on those greenlight decisions going forward.

As the bleak film ultimately warns, the real disaster is coming. Are we going to do something about it? Or do we just make and consume art about it while it happens all around us?

#moviefriend 

@diggermovie

#tomcruise 

#alejandroginnaritu

@warnerbros

#IMAX

@mncritics

Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Association (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: www.mnfca.com