Digger

Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger is almost the platonic ideal of an Alejandro Iñárritu film, at least his modern incarnation. It is staggeringly well executed, with tremendous technical acumen and exquisitely staged scenes of buffoonery, all in service of a point so painfully obvious that his insistence on its importance ultimately ruins his own movie.  Filled to the brim with some truly delightful absurdity and well-staged madness, it’s less focused on technical virtuosity the way Birdman or The Revenant was, actively using its minutely observed production design and staging in service of its story rather than the other way around.  It’s just that the story it’s in service of is kind of lame.

It's all about Digger.  Digger Rockwell is a third-generation oil man, owner of the largest oil company in the world engaged in numerous exploration and production activities around the world.  He didn’t get to that position by being too worried about safety, he did it by digging!  So when one of his scientists warns him about increasing methane emissions from a flacer around Greenland he’s not particularly worried.  Not until it breaks off and starts heading for western Europe where it seems likely to wreak untold havoc on the local population.  Havoc that only Digger and his associates in the American government can stop, or if not stop then manage not to take the blame for.

Digger’s goal, if it wasn’t obvious, is to remind viewers how often wealthy elites, strip-mining natural resources for their own wealth and power, have left behind a diminished, less habitable Earth through negligence and nihilism. It is a point of view likely already shared by anyone watching the movie. Despite its innuendo and often clever staging, there is little room for its argument to surprise you, however bizarre the delivery becomes. The delivery in fact is frequently its strongest asset. Digger is as meticulously staged as a Wes Anderson film, populating its ridiculous world with increasingly bizarre characters trying to stop a radioactive iceberg from smashing into parts of Europe and Alaska. At the center is Tom Cruise as the elderly oil baron equipped with an over-the-top Texas accent, a shovel, prosthetics, and a robot cat. As with everything he does, Cruise throws himself wholeheartedly into the absurdity and, in the process, delivers one of the better performances of his career. The sheer force of his commitment could almost make you believe in the reality of this obviously ridiculous premise.  It makes one imagine an alternate reality in which he became primarily a stage actor—a career that, for the first time, I could see him being extremely successful at. None of the film’s larger problems are his fault.

Nor a generally exceptional cast who likewise put themselves entirely into Iñárritu’s hands, mostly to the good at an individual scene level.  Everyone around Cruise, particularly Riz Ahmed, joins in with equal aplomb; their scenes together often and somewhat ironaccly the emotional heart of Digger, standing on opposite ends of its argument (such as it is).  The requirement that John Goodman become progressively more cartoonish does little to help him as he gradually takes over more and more and the film’s final segments even when trapped in a refrigerator.

The problems lie in what Iñárritu wants all this buffoonery to accomplish. The great difficulty of satire is that while its target needs to be a buffoon, or at least appear to be one—that is, in many ways, the point—it also needs some measure of competence, or at least a belief in himself and what he is doing, to give it the edge it needs to land. When everyone, including the target himself, believes he is a buffoon, satire becomes farce. That would be fine if Digger thought it was a farce. But it doesn’t. It thinks it’s a satire.

The film is at its best when it holds to its genuine absurdity. Things tend to fall apart when it reaches beyond showing us the ridiculous world it has created to explain what that world means, because the filmmakers clearly think they are saying something more important than they actually are, or at least more fundamentally insightful.  There is meaning here but not much insight but no one in the film is aware of that. The great tragedy of this supposed tragedy is that its conception of satire is faulty, however accomplished its execution.

In many ways, it recalls Coppola’s Megalopolis, although it isn’t as good. Its willingness to take big visual and conceptual swings without much concern for whether everyone will go along with them can’t help but be admired. That most viewers won’t go along is not necessarily a mark against the film. That it has less on its mind than it thinks it does is.  Maybe it would be better if Iñárritu would imagine himself as the subject of one of his films and how his interests would be portrayed in a similar deconstruction and use that as inspiration to turn his storytelling gifts to better material.  Like Digger himself, that sort of change probably isn’t possible.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.