Tom Cruise has spent the last twenty years hanging from airplanes, jumping off cliffs and trying to save movie theaters.
In Digger, he attempts his most dangerous stunt yet:
Making a two-hour lecture funny.
Hotchie motchie, does he commit.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a spectacularly wealthy oil baron whose company has helped trigger an environmental catastrophe. Faced with the possibility that he may have broken the planet, Digger sets out to save humanity — or at least make sure humanity knows who saved it.
Cruise disappears beneath an aging face, a large belly and enough Texas bluster to power Houston without fossil fuels. He’s vain, vulgar, frightening and occasionally very funny.
More importantly, he does something movie stars don’t do often enough anymore.
He looks ridiculous.
That deserves credit.
So does Emmanuel Lubezki’s VistaVision photography, which gives the movie an enormous, strange beauty. Digger’s world is filled with cavernous rooms, grotesque displays of wealth and people who appear to have been placed in them by an especially angry museum curator.
For a while, I was delighted.
An original movie!
With ideas!
Made for adults!
By a major studio!
I nearly called an ambulance.
Then the movie started explaining the ideas.
And explaining them.
And explaining why explaining them was important.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu clearly wants Digger to stand alongside Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s great comedy about powerful idiots steering civilization toward annihilation.
There is one crucial difference.
Dr. Strangelove was funny.
Kubrick used a scalpel. Iñárritu has brought a backhoe.
John Goodman fumes as the president. Riz Ahmed gets the unenviable job of being one of the few people in the movie who realizes catastrophe is bad. Sandra Hüller glowers with such force that she briefly appears capable of fixing climate change herself.
Everyone performs as though the back row is located in another state.
And yet the movie is almost impossible to dismiss completely.
There are images here I won’t forget. Cruise is genuinely fearless. One major speech about the comforts and conveniences that keep ordinary people tied to fossil fuels lands harder than most of the movie’s shouting because, for a few minutes, Digger stops congratulating itself and actually makes an argument.
Then it begins shouting again.
Late in the film, Iñárritu introduces a major structural trick that I won’t spoil. Suffice it to say that the movie suddenly pulls the rug out from underneath itself, then stands over you asking whether you noticed how cleverly it pulled the rug.
Yes.
I noticed.
I’m on the floor.
Kubrick used a scalpel. Iñárritu has brought a backhoe.
There is something almost admirable about a $125-million movie this committed to confusing, annoying and lecturing the people who paid to see it. Hollywood usually spends that kind of money making sure nobody has an unfamiliar thought.
Digger has plenty of unfamiliar thoughts.
Unfortunately, it introduces most of them with a megaphone.
Cruise deserves better than the easy joke that this is simply an awards stunt. He’s doing real acting here, and some of it is excellent. Iñárritu deserves some credit, too, for making a movie that could only have come from someone with complete confidence in what he wanted to say.
A little less confidence might have helped.
On the Shermometer, Digger lands somewhere between “ambitious failure” and “please stop yelling at me.”
Two anvils out of five.
It stinks.
But, for once, interestingly.
