What Is Tom Cruise's Digger?
Tom Cruise's new film Digger is a would-be satire about oil money, melting ice, and a man whose shrugging attitude to climate danger comes back to hit him. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs. Cruise plays the title character, an oilman with a good-ol'-boy accent, a Stetson, and a company that has been ignoring warnings about its drilling.
The setup, laid out in The Guardian's review, is simple and large. A character named Ganesh has been telling Digger for some time that his company's practices are irresponsible. The warning proves right. A vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan, breaks off the Arctic landmass and begins moving toward the coast of Norway. From there, the film turns into something stranger than a conventional disaster movie.
Cruise's look is part of the joke. The Guardian describes him with a wispy baldingness, prostheses, twang, and a Stetson borrowed from Slim Pickens' bomb-riding major in Dr. Strangelove. That is a clear signal: this is not a heroic action lead. It is a caricatured, loudmouth version of corporate power. The film wants to laugh at him while also asking the audience to feel the weight of the crisis he helped create.
The Guardian's reviewer, however, is not convinced. The review calls Digger "an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve." It also calls the film the most disappointing of the year and says very good actors turn in not very good performances.
That "trick" is the movie's main point of tension. The review explains that Digger keeps its central story moving until a big sideways lurch changes everything. At that moment, the audience's investment in the action begins to fall apart. The satire's smugness, in this reading, undermines whatever seriousness it is trying to reach. There is, the review says, something glib and overblown about the whole enterprise.
The same review still finds things to praise. The film's visual side, credited to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner, produces dreamlike, disturbing images that bulge from the screen. Cruise's boisterous performance has enjoyable moments. But the final verdict is harsh.
Why does any of this matter? Digger is the kind of big-swing film that is easy to admire in concept and easy to argue about in practice. It puts a major movie star into an unflattering role, pairs him with a director known for ambitious storytelling, and uses a real environmental threat as the engine of the plot. Whether the satire lands is now a matter of taste. The Guardian's reviewer has made the negative case clearly; viewers will have to decide whether the film's visual ambition and sheer nerve make up for the flaws.
Digger opens on 2 October in Australia, the UK and the US.