'Digger'? I Hardly Know Her
The absence of the Coen Brothers has wrought dire consequences. After splitting some eight years ago to pursue solo projects, the idiosyncratic and prolific filmmaking duo has left a massive vacuum. Few others possess their wry literary capabilities that cut to the heart of American rot, dazzling audiences with consistently fresh use of the medium while their individualistic protagonists, bearing the essential greed, nihilism, and bumbling buffoonery, meet a fate written in the stars. With nearly a decade gone by without a peep from their collective, here comes Alejandro González Iñárritu to save the day.
Every auteur tries to make their Dr. Strangelove (1964). The Coens, smartly, haven’t, but Iñárritu, a five-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker – fresh off a stint with Netflix that birthed a rare Oscars flop in his filmography – has sought redemption in his attempt at Stanley Kubrick’s great satire. Five years after Adam McKay’s bracingly stupid and aggravating Don’t Look Up (2021) comes a similarly star-studded, navel-gazey, and self-satisfied takedown of the wild, wacky times we live in. Without the Coens’ sprawling and witty ambition nor Kubrick’s piercing and singular eye, Iñárritu decides to aim for the whole chessboard of 2026, and sometimes flip it if he has to. At last, Iñárritu has given us his movie for the moment.
Digger (sort of) takes on Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), a grand Southern oil magnate whose ignorance regarding the volatility of his drilling project in the Atlantic has doomed the world to climate catastrophe. With the help of the bumbling president (John Goodman) and the jittery, guilt-addled Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger has to convince the world that he is somehow protecting it. The movie is also about a super-structure – a story-within-a-story reveal that is completely hidden from the film’s marketing – which sees Iñárritu essentially remaking his own Best Picture-winning Birdman (2014) without much new wisdom gleaned.
Digger is relentless. Iñárritu, ever the showman, reteams with long-time cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki after a decade to bring his madcap world to life. It’s a world shot through nauseating fish eyes and populated by caricatures played to the nines by an all-star cast including Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma D’Arcy, Burn Gorman and a pivotal Jesse Plemons, whose recent collaborations with the eccentric Yorgos Lanthimos serve as a more fully actualized alternative to Iñárritu’s go-for-broke approach to provocation.
Nobody reads as real. Everybody is a character. This is textually part of the facile framing device that Iñárritu uses as a get-out-of-jail-free card for poorly directed performances and a haphazard narrative. By finding an in-narrative excuse for his hamminess, he never has to commit to the bit of their exaggerated nature, nor does he have to commit to a target. Digger is an exercise in seeing how much one can get away with. In this case, it’s whether a respected filmmaker can get away with substituting real ideas and provocations with a Warner Bros-funded Facebook screed about how low our society has fallen. Rest assured, it is just as baffling to hear Tom Cruise toss out lines about TikTok and YouTube while caked in grand guginole prosthetics as you may think, but it is never as funny as anyone on set believes it to be.
Digger Rockwell is a grand amalgam of every living billionaire. Despite being a crabby old man whose business is oil, he is somehow also Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. Iñárritu and his scribes – Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone – have created a larger-than-life character whose domineering presence is a lazy send-up of the patriarchal world inside a vaguely political echo chamber. It is such a relic of the early to mid-aughts Dubya administration that there is an Al Gore joke quietly shuffled into the cacophony.
The challenge of Rockwell must be appetizing for any A-lister, but for Cruise, it presents a special sort of glory in his potential for an Oscar. After 15 straight years spent exclusively as an action star, with only a brief detour for American Made (2017), Cruise finds himself propped up once again by an auteur. Yet, his performance is only fascinating in relation to the super-secret super-structure of the film. It’s revealing of a self-awareness in the Cruise Persona that gives him an extra edge as a person, but not as a performer, and certainly not in this film. Rockwell is nothing but an empty caricature, caked in wrinkles with a wispy wig and grotesque dad-bod fatsuit, as if Cruise couldn’t go the whole nine yards. All bells and whistles with no melody. Such can be said of the entire film.
This is a vacuous exercise that seemingly exists to gesticulate at the awful state of affairs that our global leaders have settled us into and exclaim “Isn’t this absurd!” To state that a film is obvious about its intent doesn’t make the film bad, yet to make a film about the importance of presenting these facts – that billionaires are evil and that the fate of the world is decided upon the whim of their fickle oligarchy – and to add nothing profound, let alone entertaining or delightful, is embarrassing. Wes Anderson’s sublime Asteroid City (2023) recently approached a similar meta-narrative with a wizened melancholy and provided one of the more cathartic texts about the intersection between art and devastation, especially in regards to modern blights (Asteroid City is, in this writer’s opinion, still the only good movie about COVID-19). Here, Iñárritu throws spaghetti at the wall and rips out the kitchen sink for good measure.
While Iñárritu, fresh from working with Netflix to make his incredibly personal Bardo (2022), seems conflicted about what it means to take openly evil financing to push something you believe in past the finish line, Jesse Plemons, one of our finest actors, plays a nexus. Something stews within Plemons, as it did during his movie-stealing scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), with a much more melancholy air of menace. In an otherwise airless film with little to offer beyond some lovely recreations of Ken Adam's sets – courtesy of the Coens’ regular collaborator Dennis Gassner – Plemons’ character represents the only real point of provocation.
Where Plemons eventually lands in the narrative may very well be a dark confession from an artist troubled by his willingness to feed into the system. Maybe this satire within a satire is a triple-edged blade too sharp for audiences to see until they’ve been cut. Yet, this is all coming from a man who plays the cloying and infuriating final shot of The Revenant (2015) completely straight, and who is mired in a year-long awards campaign for this movie while following his prior movie about the pains of awards campaigning. Or joys.
With Iñárritu, one wishes he could be so mysterious that there was ever a real question about anything, textual, metatextual or otherwise. Instead, Digger plays like a diatribe with no target. Joel, Ethan, please work it out on the remix. This aggression will not stand.
Digger opens in theaters everywhere October 2.
-August
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