Movie Review: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Satire ‘Digger’

Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon who pushes the world to the brink of cataclysm in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s divisive dark comedy.

As Warner Bros.’ final release before its merger with Skydance, Digger already seemed destined for a place in Hollywood history. Turns out, the promising team-up of Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) and mega-star Tom Cruise is also a bomb for the ages. Under the headline “Deconstructing the Disaster,” Deadline claims the film could lose $150 million.

Meanwhile, the tepid critical response has many counting Digger out of their Oscar pools, while others are touting it as a misunderstood masterpiece. Being fascinated by overweening, messy satires (I own a DVD of Southland Tales, see sidebar), I had to see what the fuss was about.

The deal

It’s just another day in the obscenely luxurious mansion of oil billionaire Digger Rockwell (Cruise), who appears to love no one except his moribund feline bedmate, Maggie. (Don’t worry, cat lovers — she’s animatronic.)

Then Digger gets an update from Greenland, where he has a drilling lease thanks to his friendship with the current occupant of the White House (John Goodman). A panicked scientist (Riz Ahmed) explains that Digger’s rig caused a methane explosion that detached a giant ice shelf, which is now on a collision course with Europe. With six-figure casualties predicted, Digger meets with the president and his inner circle about addressing the threat — not to the world, but to their power and control of the narrative.

Anyone who tries to hold Digger accountable for his rapacious negligence gets a high-volume lecture on their own hypocrisy. (He likes to point out that few of us are carbon-neutral.) But for all this titan’s rhetorical gamesmanship, the narrative may end up slipping through his fingers.

Will you like it?

A problem looms like a melting ice shelf for anyone who tries to create fiction about the climate crisis: It’s tough to visualize or narrativize without wild hyperbole. Most critics thought Don’t Look Up, which used metaphor to broach the issue, was too on the nose. And The Day After Tomorrow, which put a climate apocalypse on-screen, was just another bad disaster movie.

Iñárritu and his cowriters clearly recognize the perils they face. Besides trying to say something about the climate, they’re making a big, bold satire about a historical moment so rife with absurdity that it practically spoofs itself. Based on Digger’s trailer, you might think they’ve simply concocted another broad comedy with obvious targets, preaching to the converted.

They haven’t. Digger has layers of self-awareness that go beyond facile parody, though explaining just how the story bites its own tail would be a spoiler. For lack of specifics, let’s just say the film’s aesthetic is weirdly Wes Anderson. The landscapes outside Digger’s mansion evoke Thomas Cole paintings, as obviously fake as poor Maggie. Each scene appears to take place in a diorama created by an obsessive miniaturist, thanks to production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson. And cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki washes it all in a merciless, tallowy light, so we can see every wrinkle and crack in the crumbling gerontocracy.

These visuals place gigantic scare quotes around the story, and the framing is no mere affectation. Digger’s best scenes are the ones in which Iñárritu allows the intricately composed images to say things for him.

But the film’s biggest problem is that, to reach those scenes, we have to endure very long stretches of people (mostly men) shouting at each other. Everyone in Digger debates and speechifies, sometimes all at once. For all the flashes of wit and insight on display, the overall effect is numbing.

Stronger editing could have curtailed these yelling matches and highlighted the performances that matter. Ahmed and Cruise make fine sparring partners — representing, respectively, youth and age, science and industry, insecurity and megalomania. As the Bible-thumping president, Goodman soars way over the top in a good way. But the bickering between Digger and his sister (a wasted Sandra Hüller) is pointless. A crucial moment involving Jesse Plemons is staged more like a debate club than the revelation it should be.

Cruise isn’t the problem with the movie. Insufferable as Digger himself is, the nuance and humility of the performance make it more than a gimmick. But Digger is unlikely to appeal to the star’s average fan, and its crowded chaos could alienate many art-house viewers as well.

The result is a well-intentioned failure — a noble failure, one might even say. Sooner or later, we have to figure out how to tell stories about climate crisis and societal collapse, and Digger faces that problem with a chutzpah worthy of its protagonist. Despite not reaching a solution, it digs deep enough to force us to think.

If you like this, try…

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964; Sony Pictures CORE, Tubi, rentable): An unhinged general nudges the world toward nuclear Armageddon in Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy. Channeling the fears of the first generation raised during the Cold War, it set the template for films like Digger.

Don’t Look Up (2021; Netflix): Adam McKay’s comedy, in which two astronomers try to warn the world of an approaching asteroid, has been widely criticized as a heavy-handed spoof of the non-response to climate crisis. (Since the movie’s theme is willful ignorance, I would argue that perhaps you can’t be heavy-handed enough.)

Southland Tales (2006; Disney+, Hulu, Roku Channel, Tubi, rentable): Those who believe Digger will become a cult classic can take heart from the recent 20-year resurgence of Richard Kelly’s incoherent and panned — yet weirdly prescient! — dystopian satire, set in a fascist U.S.