Digger Movie Review:
At first, something feels off. The absurdist tone is too heightened, Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell feels too caricaturish, the satirical commentary feels too one-dimensional, the world feels shallow, and the stakes keep ballooning like a cartoon plot. And then the film flips the script. Almost 30 minutes in, it is revealed that we have been watching the rehearsal of a play based on true incidents that happened inside the world of the film. Now, the actual meta commentary of Digger starts to unravel. If you thought the satire was trite and one-dimensional, the actor who plays Digger, Curtis Markson (Tom Cruise), agrees with you. With this revelation, the film essentially gives you directions for peeling back its layers, digging deeper, and reading between the lines. Digger then shifts from a simple environmental satire to a complex, layered analysis of global elites, the inner workings of mass manipulation, and, of course, the sheer absurdity of an imminent climate crisis being ignored.
Director: Alejandro G Inarritu
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Digger is as much a critique of the world elites as it is a commentary on climate change. The play inside the film, based on true events, follows Digger Rockwell, a wealthy oil tycoon who, along with the upper echelon of the US government, scrambles to stop a climate-change disaster born of their greed and willful ignorance. The play may claim to show how men in power operate, but it's still a smokescreen put up by the rich and powerful who control the world. We see how the play, which derides the elites, is still funded by the descendants of the same people who turned the world into a hellish dystopian nightmare, and who are still in power. And a big part of how they accomplish such levels of control is wonderfully conveyed through Kenny (Jesse Plemons), a producer of the play. He tells you that he is financing the play, which essentially invites the audience to laugh and curse at his family. The catharsis of storytelling becomes a tool for manipulation. In that way, Alejandro G Inarritu’s Digger becomes a potent commentary on cinema as well.
Inarritu turns the critical lens towards the public as well. In a heated argument between Curtis and the play’s director, Hannah (Sophie Wilde), he complains that Digger is portrayed as an unsophisticated buffoon, but that is not the image he got from his research; he is appalled that such a global disaster is reduced to a one-dimensional satire. Hannah retorts that the people who lost everything to the disaster need to be able to laugh at it, and that it was Curtis’ generation that destroyed everything anyway. Curtis and Hannah represent political arguments that have their heart in the right place and yet, inadvertently end up losing each other in a cacophony of never-ending arguments, the noise of which ends up being used by the one-percenters to advance their plans. The scene ends with Kenny cutting in to resolve the issue with a non sequitur, which is exactly the kind of brilliant satire Inarritu buries beneath layers of watered-down commentary. It is interesting to note Tom Cruise’s layered performance as an actor portraying a man he understands in a way the play or the world around him refuses to look at. At the beginning, you might feel like Tom Cruise’s heart isn't in it. And then you realise that Tom Cruise wants you to feel that way, and that it is Curtis whose heart is not in it. It is Curtis who pushes himself to play Digger Rockwell in a way that he disagrees with. Even if you subtract the prosthetics work, the eccentric action star we know and love is nowhere to be found. This might be one of Tom Cruise’s greatest performances.
A climate-change satire on the surface, Digger is, at its heart, an audacious critique of how global elites continue to destroy the world, exploit its resources, and still retain their position at the top through incredibly layered psychological mass manipulation.
