Digger digs deep for satire but rarely finds anything worth unearthing.
Alejandro Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) returns with Digger, a pitch-black satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an eccentric Texan oil tycoon who has spent his life drilling into the planet and getting extraordinarily rich in the process. When his actions help trigger an environmental catastrophe, Digger embarks on a frantic mission to convince everyone that he might also be the man capable of saving it. Surrounded by politicians, scientists and an increasingly desperate inner circle, Digger must confront a sizeable problem: what happens when the man promising to put out the fire is also the one who lit the match?
There are more than a few moments in Digger where you realise the film thinks it’s much cleverer than you. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it had something particularly clever to say, but for a film so determined to satirise the stupidity of those making decisions in the world, it somehow manages to treat its audience with roughly the same level of intelligence. If you’re going to go bleak, and Digger is relentlessly bleak, you’ve got to be funny. Unfortunately, too many of its jokes hit with all the precision of a middling SNL sketch.
That leaves you wondering who exactly this is for. Its targets aren’t particularly difficult to identify, and its social commentary rarely ventures beyond the surface, yet the film insists on explaining itself anyway. But for all its posturing it forgets one crucial thing. We live in this world. We understand the absurdity. Trust us to connect some of the dots. Instead, Digger spends so much time making sure everyone understands what it’s saying that any bite its satire might have had is gradually ground down to eye rolling levels.
That uncertainty extends to the film itself. Half the cast appear to have been told they’re making Birdman, while the other half think they’ve wandered onto the set of a Wes Anderson picture (Wes himself should be calling Riz Ahmed immediately). It leaves Digger stranded somewhere between theatrical farce, black comedy and serious social commentary without ever finding the balance required to make those ingredients work together. And this comes from someone who likes Birdman and loves The Revenant; bleakness isn’t the problem here. It’s what you do with it.
The easiest comparison is Adam McKay’s similarly misguided Don’t Look Up, another satire that wastes top-tier talent while hammering home point after point long after we’ve got the message, with a string of deeply unfunny bits.
The great frustration is that whenever Tom Cruise is allowed to cut through the noise, Digger briefly becomes something much more interesting. Decades of running, jumping and saving the world can make it easy to forget just how good Cruise can be when asked to simply inhabit a character. There are flashes here of the actor who gave us Magnolia and Collateral, his movie-star charisma bent into something stranger and more uncomfortable. When he’s properly let loose, he’s excellent. The problem is that those moments are fleeting, and one of the film’s biggest narrative decisions takes the air out of his performance for much of what follows.
That decision creates an even larger problem. Digger already keeps its characters at arm’s length, but in removing one of the audience’s most obvious entry points, it makes an emotionally cold film even harder to invest in. You’re left watching people behave terribly inside a deliberately ridiculous world, without being given enough reason to care about any of them. Satire doesn’t require likeable characters, but it does need something for an audience to grab onto.
Perhaps most frustratingly, the single most interesting idea Digger has arrives as the credits begin to roll. It’s a choice that actually opens the film up, suggesting consequences and reactions beyond the strange little bubble we’ve spent the previous two hours inhabiting. You almost wish that had been the film, and it’ll be fascinating to see how audiences react when it goes wide. Oscars had been the talk beforehand, and whether the Academy decides to embrace a similar film
There’s clearly ambition here, and hopefully this isn’t the last time Cruise swaps action man for something weirder and more challenging. But ambition and intention only get you so far. Digger wants to be funny, bleak and socially incisive all at once, yet never digs (sorry) far enough into any of them.
Verdict
For a film so desperate to expose a world of fools, it could have afforded to trust the people watching it a little more.
