Digger, Defended
The year’s most ambitious flop, and why the noise is the point
Spoiler note: This piece discusses the film’s structural turn about thirty minutes in. Nothing about the ending.
Deep into Digger, I nearly applauded a man for defending fossil fuels.
He is standing before a European council that is in the process of sinking into chaos, and he is magnificent. Ten minutes, one unbroken take, the camera circling him like a nervous aide. He mocks the delegates, flatters them, and finally accuses them of wanting him to keep drilling all along. By the end, the audience inside the film is on its feet. My hands were halfway to each other before I remembered who he was and what he had done to the world.
That half-clap is the movie. If you ask me, I’d say that everything else Alejandro González Iñárritu has built — and he has built a great deal, at enormous expense, to near-universal confusion — exists to set up that one small, embarrassing reflex.
The film they sold us
Warner Bros. marketed Digger as a big, strange disaster comedy. Tom Cruise, buried under prosthetics as a bald, paunchy Southern oil baron named Digger Rockwell, causes a catastrophe and then tries to save the world from it. Cruise in a fat suit, Iñárritu letting loose. Fine. I’d have bought a ticket for that.
For about thirty minutes, that is the film you get. Digger lives in a mansion with alligators pinned to the ceiling and a mirror framed in antlers. His great love is Maggie, a thirty-year-old cat kept alive well past decency and played by a clunky animatronic that looks like it wandered off the set of a puppet show for adults. A drilling operation in Greenland knocks loose an ice shelf, an iceberg nicknamed “Judy” heads for Norway, and Digger reaches for the spin machine. John Goodman plays the president, Michael Stuhlbarg plays a vice president who seems to have been switched off at the wall, and Riz Ahmed plays a scientist named Ganesh whom nobody will listen to. As a man named after the same elephant-headed god, I took this personally.
(Fun fact: Fahadh Faasil auditioned for the part, but Iñárritu wasn’t sold on his accent and wanted him to spend a few months in the US training it. Fahadh passed. As a Fahadh fan, I’d have loved to see him pull off the dorky Kerala scientist; he’d have done it in his sleep. But Riz Ahmed is superb, and his delivery is right on the money.)
It’s broad, it’s ugly to look at on purpose, and it’s very loud. Plenty of people seem to have checked out here, at least mentally, and filed it under Don’t Look Up with a bigger makeup budget.
Then the floor drops out.
What we have been watching is a stage rehearsal. The year is roughly three decades from now; the world is overheated and waterlogged, and everyone wears a breathing mask outdoors. A celebrated play called Fossil Fools is about to open, and Cruise isn’t playing Digger. He’s playing Curtis, a renowned stage actor who is playing Digger — the most hated man in human history, the one who, as far as these people are concerned, broke the planet. Curtis isn’t sure he should be playing him for laughs at all. He’s also distracted, because his daughter’s flight has gone missing.
Why (I think) it has to be this loud
The most common complaint I’ve read is that Digger is too much. Cruise is overacting. Goodman is overacting. The sets are overdressed, the satire is obvious, the whole thing is shouting.
Yes. That’s the play.
Fossil Fools is a farce written by survivors, for survivors. Along the way we learn that the real Digger Rockwell was nothing like this cartoon — he was, by all accounts, severe and calculating. The people living in the wreckage have chosen to remember him as a blowhard with a dying cat, because a blowhard is easier to live with. If the man who ended the world was a clown, then the world ended by accident, and nobody in the audience has to think too hard about how many times they filled the tank or voted for the fellow promising cheap gas.
So when critics call the performances grotesque, they’re reviewing the play, and the play is the subject of the film. Cruise is giving two performances at once: Curtis’s big, crowd-pleasing Digger, which is meant to be a little much, and Curtis himself, a working actor quietly wondering whether he’s being asked to launder a monster. The prosthetics are a costume inside a costume. It may be the most interesting thing Cruise has done since Magnolia, and I say that as someone who has happily watched him hang off airplanes for twenty years.
This is what makes the council speech land. On stage, Curtis is so good, so charismatic, that the Fossil Fools audience rises to applaud him — people who have spent their whole lives hating Digger, cheering a speech in praise of oil. They came to laugh at the fools on stage, and for ten minutes they became them. Iñárritu stages the scene so that we’re effectively seated in that council chamber too, and he invites us to do the same.
The trailer was part of the film
Someone pointed out online that the film’s very existence undercuts its own argument: a nine-figure studio product about how spectacle swallows dissent, sold with a misleading trailer. That’s not wrong. I just think the film knows.
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Digger is about narrative control — about how the people with the most to lose from the truth get to decide which story the rest of us are told. And Iñárritu sold us a story. The marketing showed the top layer and hid everything underneath, and a lot of viewers walked out feeling tricked. Fair enough. But the film is quietly asking how we can be furious at a filmmaker for misleading us about a plot twist and so much calmer about the people who spent decades misleading us about the weather.
That is, admittedly, a little smug. Digger is often smug. It is arrogant and overdesigned and entirely convinced of its own importance. I’d still take that over another polite movie that agrees with me.
What it looks and sounds like
Emmanuel Lubezki shot it on 35mm, and the color of the thing is remarkable — a sickly, jaundiced yellow-green, like the complexion of very old men who have spent too long indoors under fluorescent light. Which describes most of the cast. The wide lenses make every room feel slightly too big and every face slightly too close. Cosmo Sheldrake’s score sounds like a broken organ grinder playing in a swamp, with frogs and dripping water mixed in, and I mean that as the highest praise. What a zany score!
Sandra Hüller, as Digger’s sister, trying to launch a green company while her brother is busy drowning Norway, is drily, wonderfully funny; she has always been good at playing the only adult in the room. Jesse Plemons is excellent. Goodman goes so far over the top as the president that it becomes its own kind of commitment. And Maggie the cat — clunky, mechanical, unmistakably not real — turns out to be clunky for a reason I won’t spoil.
Compson’s passion play
If Cruise’s Digger is the film’s engine, John Goodman’s President Compson is its pipe organ. Compson is dying of terminal cancer, in the least dignified location available, and the film refuses to let him do it quietly. Every symptom is an event. Every wince is played to the room. He is a man who has never had a private moment and has no intention of starting now, so the cancer simply becomes one more thing to perform.
Around him the film builds a small church. Compson keeps a fawning pastor in his inner circle, the Reverend Nathaniel Moore, who prays over the president and his cabinet right after they’ve wrapped up a meeting about what the iceberg will cost them — the people it will kill coming a distant second on the agenda. The prayer arrives complete with speaking in tongues. It is very (very) funny and slightly horrifying, which is the film’s preferred register.
Then the two threads braid together. Egged on by the pastor, Compson starts to see his dying as something grander: a sacrifice, a man taking the sins of the world onto his own failing body. A president with a terminal diagnosis decides he is Christ, and the decisions that follow are exactly as dangerous as that sounds. When someone tries to talk him down with scripture, he tosses the Bible aside as a book “written by Hebrews, not Americans.” I laughed out loud, and then felt a little ill.
Some religious reviewers have taken all this as an attack on faith. I read it differently. The film isn’t mocking prayer so much as the uses power finds for it. Compson’s religion works the same way his cancer theatrics do, and the same way Digger’s cowboy hat does: it turns a private fact into a public performance, and a public catastrophe into a private destiny. It’s narrative control again, this time with a cross on it. A man who can’t control an iceberg, or his own body, can still control the story of what it all means, and naturally he picks the version in which he is the savior.
It helps to remember who is staging this. Inside the film, Compson isn’t a president but a character in Fossil Fools, played by an actor, for an audience that lived through the real thing. The playwright has made him grotesque, holy-rolling, and dying in the most ridiculous way imaginable, because that is how survivors take their revenge on the men who did this to them.
Where the film stumbles
Digger isn’t flawless in my opinion, and the flaw that has grown on me since is the daughter. Curtis’s missing child is meant to be the thing that cracks him open, the private dread underneath his doubts about playing Digger, and the film treats it almost as an errand: a phone call between rehearsals, a worried look in the wings, then back to the play. I wanted to sit with him offstage far longer than the film allows. That backstage world is where his unease about the role should live, and it’s underfurnished next to the gilded madhouse of Fossil Fools.
The bomb
Digger opened on October 2 to $8 million in the U.S. and Canada and finished fifth — apparently, Cruise’s weakest opening since Lions for Lambs in 2007. The reported budget lands somewhere between $125 million and $180 million, depending on who’s talking, and the internet has been enjoying the arithmetic.
Ben Affleck, who knows something about being a public punching bag, put it well on a podcast this week. He likened the glee over the film’s failure to high school bullying and noted that a lot of the people piling on hadn’t seen it. His larger point is the one that matters: punish the movies that take risks, and what you get back is a steady supply of homogenized ones. (He said it less politely.) Boy, am I sick of all these franchise sequels.
I don’t need Digger to be a masterpiece to want more films like it. I happen to think it might be one, or might become one once the noise dies down and people can watch it without the box-office scoreboard hovering over their shoulder.
Movies have come back from worse. The Shawshank Redemption lost money in theaters in 1994; it’s now the film half the country stops channel-surfing for. The Big Lebowski was shrugged off on release and now has its own fan festival. I have a feeling Digger is headed down that road. A second wind at the box office is a harder bet, though a good awards season for Cruise might send people back. More likely its new admirers will find it at home, which is a pity, given what Lubezki put on that screen.
See it big
It’s still in theaters, and it’s built for the largest screen you can find. Lubezki’s images lose a lot on a laptop, and the council scene in particular deserves a room full of strangers who might, like me, start to clap. If you hated it the first time, I’d gently suggest a second look, this time watching Curtis instead of Digger.
I’m planning to go again this weekend. I’ll try to keep my hands in my lap.
