When I go into a movie by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, I know I’m going to hate myself. In terms of pure talent, he’s on an equal footing with his Mexican film-school buddies Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro. Nevertheless, Iñárritu’s cudgel-like storytelling, his habit of making the same point three times because he doesn’t trust us to get it the first two, and his tendency to hype himself up over the importance of his stories means that at some point, I’m going to say to myself, “You idiot! Why did you agree to this?” (And knowing that I’m going to hate myself and subjecting myself to the experience anyway just makes me hate myself all the more.)
Of all filmmakers working today, only Lars von Trier has the same effect on me, which tells you what a special director it takes to do that. There is a great deal about Iñárritu’s Digger that I can’t tell you, but I can say that I felt that old bile rising up in my throat again before it offered me some mitigation, if not nearly enough.
Tom Cruise portrays Digger Rockwell, a superannuated Texas oilman sometime in the future. His drilling for petroleum on the ice caps of Greenland has created an environmental catastrophe that’s set to kill millions of people in Northern Europe, yet he remains more concerned about keeping his terminally ill Persian cat (played by an animatronic robot) alive. The president of the United States (John Goodman) and his cabinet and joint chiefs come to Digger’s house in Washington to discuss what to do, and they’re all more concerned with PR damage control than with warning America’s allies about their impending doom.
The president himself is dying of anal cancer, which he’s now happy about because it gives him an excuse to go to the hospital instead of doing something. His staffers watch floods wash over London and Amsterdam, and they’re so horrified that they can barely eat their popcorn. We get a good half-hour of this political satire that plays like the Coen brothers at their cartoonish worst, with overly broad accents, actors bugging out their eyes, and all these political and military knuckleheads running roughshod over Digger’s climate scientist (Riz Ahmed) who spent years warning everybody that this would happen.
Just as you’re thinking that you can’t endure two hours of this, something unexpected happens at the half-hour mark. A framing story that adds a metafictional layer onto the movie is introduced. This actually works better than the main story, and it offers up some small measure of redemption. Part of me suspects that it’s all Iñárritu’s hedge against accusations of bad satire (and bad satire this definitely is), but the framing device poses questions about the usefulness of continuing to make art and tell stories when civilization is literally falling apart. Iñárritu answers in the affirmative, and puts it across in a convincing way.
If only we didn’t have to sit through so much cack-handed buffoonery to get to it. There are neat performances by Ahmed and Sandra Hüller — as Digger’s younger sister, the German Oscar nominee proves she can do this sort of broad comedy as well. Donning several pounds of prosthetics, Cruise comes out ahead, especially during a showpiece monologue when Digger takes ownership of his misdeeds in front of an extremely hostile European Union meeting. (The younger Cruise wouldn’t have been able to sustain such a lengthy speech.) The role fits his cracked, gonzo side and points a new direction for him now that he’s seemingly left action blockbusters behind. He still can’t make Digger into the statement on American hubris that Iñárritu is aiming for. The movie’s own hubris makes it a fascinatingly grotesque failure.
Digger
Starring Tom Cruise and John Goodman. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman. Rated R.
