Digger is a story about the stories we tell ourselves. In many ways, I found myself thinking back to The Odyssey in that respect; both films play with perspective by rooting their narratives in the disparate and sometimes conflicting stories we tell not just each other but also ourselves. Though where The Odyssey shows us conflicting points of view from the same story, Digger wants us to consider how those stories define our reality.
I want to start by giving Tom Cruise the props he wholly deserves; he absolutely eats this film up, and it is a pleasure to witness. He is having such an obviously wonderful time you can’t help but be enamoured by his raw energy – I had my concerns over the prosthetics, but what begins as slightly cakey wrinkles soon slides unnoticed into the pantomime being painted before you. Cruise plays very close to the line of overacting, and I suspect some will say he stepped over it; however, I think there is an insecure desperation that runs counter to the big bad bravado and provides just enough context for the performance we see. Fundamentally, if you’re expecting a demure and considered performance, Sense and Sensibility is playing in screen 4, Digger makes no bones about the tone it is looking to strike, and if you’re willing to meet Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who directs, on his level, there is a wonderful time to be had. There is also the twist – which I will not be spoiling in this review – that I think further justifies the choices being made by the whole cast. You can judge its validity for yourselves.
Digger Rockwell is the all-American oil tycoon responsible for the reckless business practices that lead to a massive methane explosion in Greenland, and the launch of Judy, the 400ft tall ice shelf six times the size of Boston… thus begins a catastrophe of global proportions that only Digger can stop.
The composition throughout the film is delicious. Part of this will, of course, be the IMAX screen I was fortunate enough to see the film on, and yet the blending of the surreal with the very real was done in such a way that felt intentionally alien but endearing. I wanted to devour each scene not always because of its richness but because of a novel peculiarity, a vision that challenges the viewer to let go of the safety of consistent realism and instead glut on the feast of ideas without the shackles of continuity. Enormous oil rigs, sitting in a shimmering sea of plastic film. Impossibly claustrophobic conference rooms with expansive landscapes as backdrop. I don’t want to mischaracterise the film; it’s certainly no work of Salvador Dali, and despite the comparison to the stylings of Wes Anderson, I really don’t know that the similarities hold much beyond the choreography. Where Anderson’s work often presents an orderly minimalism, Iñárritu’s world is garish and rotten, indulgent but with no sense of taste – thoroughly delicious.
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Some of my favourite colour compositions were in the hall of bureaucrats. A stand-in for the EU/UN/other generic Global Alliance, Digger is dragged into chambers that feel part courtroom, part coliseum. The orderly construction certainly feels fabricated; I will concede a Anderson comparison here, and yet it is the furious, sweaty, ugly bureaucrats who lend this scene its energy. They are ravenous, animalistic; they want blood, and they don’t care if it causes them more problems in the long run – they need their catharsis. There are no individuals among them, only a consensus, like a flock of swallows; no individual bird knows the overall direction of travel, only to follow the next. A cacophony builds to suffocate Digger, only for Cruise to turn it up to 11 and claw back his narrative. Reminding us of the central theme that Iñárritu weaves through the film.
I have seen the complaints of overacting, and to them I say boo! Lazy illiterate consumers of slop cry about the film leaving thematic questions unresolved; they cry about the film being satire, or rather satire without a resolution. They cry about the film not being on the side of life. Maybe it comes down to a matter of taste, and maybe I simply have a higher tolerance for the indulgencies of surrealism, but I can’t help but feel that I am coming away from this film with a richer experience of the questions Iñárritu is looking to explore than those who obsess over the details of realism and over-acting. There are, of course, parts of the film I wasn’t enamoured with; the shocking underuse of Sandra Hüller being one of them. I am sure she would have brought a brilliant frustration to each scene that would have contributed to that ugly, sweaty superficial energy that is at the core of so much of this film.
Additionally, I suspect the messaging of the film may turn some viewers off. It’s hard to tell stories about climate change; at best it comes across as preachy, at worst it becomes existentially depressing. And while I’ll maintain this isn’t really a film about climate change, I won’t be so obtuse as to pretend I don’t know what is being referenced here. So yes, the film says climate change is bad, and greedy men have doomed us all, big whoop. If you think that’s preachy, so be it, but if you can accept the film for what it is presenting itself to be, I think there is an awful lot of fun to be had watching Tom Cruise absolutely chew this film up.
★★★★
In cinemas from October 2nd / Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg / Dir: Alejandro G. Iñárritu / Warner Bros /15
