The last time Alejandro González Iñárritu made a movie, he tackled an issue of world-historical importance: himself. The director’s epically scaled Netflix feature, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, was a homecoming to Mexico and the art house; it registered an 8.5 on the Fellini scale. Channeling such plangent universal anxieties as the dread of an impending lifetime achievement award, AGI’s film à clef transcended its subtitle, acting as more than a so-called “false chronicle.” Sprinkled in amid the usual showboating and chain-yanking were a handful of truths about Iñárritu’s overbearing auteur brand and why so many people find it annoying.
From its liminally minded title on down, Bardo suggested a state of stasis. For his follow-up, the two-time Oscar winner (and BMW and Rolex pitchman) soars out of purgatory and into the inferno. Digger, which opened Friday, has become the wrong kind of conversation piece, at least as far as its studio is concerned. (The film made $8 million during its opening weekend.) The Warner Bros. marketing team has apparently settled on “decide for yourself” as a rallying cry; it’s hard to recoup $150 million by monetizing ambivalence. Digger will also be the last dream project green-lit at WB by outgoing executives Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who leave behind a legacy of edgy blockbusters. Last year, Paul Thomas Anderson got the studio to bankroll an eccentric, enjoyably cartoony excursion into radical chic. AGI sees PTA and raises him one wildly stylized, glacier-sized climate change comedy. Call it A Handful of Inconvenient Truths.
Digger could be the evil twin of this spring’s box office champ Project Hail Mary; both are parables about how the only thing standing between the world and its annihilation is a resourceful A-list movie star—Ryan Gosling there, Tom Cruise here—with Sandra Huller in tow. (With his wispy wig and false teeth in Digger, the erstwhile Maverick could pass for Toni Erdmann.) Apocalyptic spectacle is a sign of the times, but where Phil Lord and Christopher Miller genuinely want you to stop your crying, Iñárritu deals exclusively in alienation effects.
Of course he does: This is a director who means to rabble-rouse rather than please crowds. He’s a polemicist who warned against the culture-destroying scourge of superhero movies in Birdman (credit where it’s due—he was ahead of the curve), an adventurer who dragged his crew through the mountains Herzog-style in The Revenant, an artiste who claimed that “to make a good movie is war,” a self-styled wizard who conjured up an immersive VR installation about border crossing called Carne y Arena (“brutalizing and trivializing,” per Artforum). Iñárritu would never stoop to mere entertainment—he wants to use cinema to map geopolitical connections (Babel), to plumb the depths of misery (Biutiful), to measure the weight of the frickin’ human soul (21 Grams—turns out it’s the same, give or take, as a Snickers bar).
There’s a fine line between chin stroking and jerking other parts of the artistic anatomy. Iñárritu’s dexterity, which is by now as undeniable as his hubris, has always had a masturbatory dimension. That’s another way of saying, maybe, that his movies feel handmade, tactile, and inventive on a big scale. Taken on its own grandiose, forbidding terms as a form of maximalist, doomscrolling spectacle—think Roy Andersson meets Roland Emmerich, or The Death of Stalin with a Brazil wax—Digger is impressive, and its concerns are ostensibly trenchant. In a moment when slop of every conceivable flavor gets sluiced through multiplexes and streaming platforms alike, Iñárritu means to give us a banquet’s worth of food for thought.
Dig into Digger, though, and it reveals itself as a thought experiment in which the destruction of the permafrost is really a pretense for navel-gazing. The literal curtain that rises on Tom Cruise’s eponymous oil magnate in the opening sequence offers a double-edged clue as to Digger’s structure and focus; it’s a nudge to peer through the artifice and see yet another self-portrait of the artist, albeit one diffused across a group of symbolic stand-ins rather than concentrated on a doppelgänger á la Bardo. To Digger’s obvious reference points of Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes (the latter invoked via a poster for his behind-the-scenes masterpiece, Opening Night), we might add Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Iñárritu is large; he contains multitudes.
That formulation goes double for Cruise, who has reached a point where he’s acting in his own shadow. Every role he plays demands a (dead) reckoning with his public persona; Digger extends and burlesques the messianic subtext of the last few Mission: Impossible films. Where Top Gun: Maverick and the upcoming Days of Thunder sequel represent victory laps around Cruise’s iconography, Iñárritu’s film is the best chance he’s had to take a real detour since 1999, when he appeared successively in Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia. The latter surely comes to mind during Digger, which features a series of unhinged run-on monologues about fossil fuels whose message could be paraphrased as “produce and destroy”; one way to look at Cruise’s role is as if he were playing pickup artist influencer Frank T.J. Mackey and the ailing patriarch Earl Partridge at the same time.
The jowly, tough-talking Digger Rockwell is a paunchy, punchy master-of-the-universe type, with a 10-gallon hat and a derrick-sized ego. He shrugs off EPA warnings like robocalls and has the president on speed dial; he treats his employees like servants while doting sweetly on a decrepit white cat with a remaining life expectancy “between two weeks and five minutes.” Digger’s absurdly ornate mansion—so absurdly ornate, hint hint, that it feels more like a simulacrum of luxury than the real thing—is adorned with the skulls and bones of all kinds of dead animals. The driller is an apex predator.
The first trailer for Digger was calibrated as a highlight reel of Cruise’s career, touting him as a generational icon (“We’ve never trusted a man more,” as per the tagline) and implying he may be due for an Oscar. “If we can’t control the course of nature, we can control the narrative,” says Digger at one point in the film, a line that can’t help but boomerang back on the image-conscious actor delivering it. If the Academy Awards are a barometer of mainstream, upper-middlebrow film culture, Cruise should have given a couple of acceptance speeches by now (let’s say for Jerry Maguire, the part he was born to play). Digger’s bizarreness may be a bridge too far for voters, but it’s hard to gainsay Cruise’s skill or sweat equity in bringing its namesake to life and putting his own professional narcissism on the line in the process.
Digger’s surname evokes the glad-handing of former vice president Nelson Rockefeller as surely as the ersatz Americana of Norman Rockwell; his power and charisma are directly proportional to his ability to spin a yarn. Decked out in the cowboy drag he inherited from his wildcatting grandfather—shades of Daniel Plainview—he wields the old man’s shovel like the rhetorical equivalent of a flaming sword. Digger gets off on his own good-old-boy obstreperousness; he’s a born showman with the courage, such as it is, of his late-capitalist convictions. That swaggering confidence explains why he resists the cease-and-desist recommendations of the advisers on-site in Greenland, where a massive offshore drilling operation is underway; cue a methane explosion that vaporizes several dozen employees—collateral damage he’s OK with—while shaking loose a chunk of tundra the size of Maryland.
With one gimlet eye on his stock price and another on the doomsday clock, Digger convenes his inner circle, including John Goodman’s lame-duck President Compson, a grotesque effigy of Bidenian decay who’s suffering mightily from “cancer of the asshole.” The bigwigs toss around blame—and the hypothetical nuclear football—for a while before opting to follow Digger’s plan, a global social media blackout on the runaway ice shelf and its projected landfall on the other side of the Atlantic. That’s what he means by controlling the narrative. Why bother creating a panic? For Norway, the unexpected virtue of ignorance is not knowing what’s about to hit them.
So far, so Strangelovian, with everybody in the cast—not just Cruise and Goodman but a boozy Huller as Digger’s sister and a bewildered Riz Ahmed as his pet scientist—doing their best Peter Sellers. If you found the high-decibel misanthropy of Birdman funny, these scenes will be hilarious. Iñárritu seems to have other ideas, or maybe he feels bad, because the bloviating is in quotation marks this time. Birdman was all athletic, long takes, but Digger (also shot by Emmanuel Lubezki but with a dirtier, dried-out palette) favors crosscutting, because there are actually two movies going on simultaneously here—neither of which, for the record, is the musical theorized in advance by pundits perplexed by the oblique cutting of the film’s trailer. The actual secret, which will probably be out in the open by the time you’re reading this review, is at once even goofier and more mortifying than an all-singing, all-dancing eco-horror movie about a runaway glacier.
In truth, neither half of Digger is very good—they’re two sides of the same inflated counterfeit coin. That doesn’t mean the movie is worthless, however. There’s a certain fascination in watching a heavy-horsepower filmmaker pop the hood to expose the pistons pounding away underneath. Iñárritu isn’t just showing off, either; he’s taking his contraptions apart piece by piece. At the risk of making a merely clever film sound ingenious, the shortcomings of Digger’s first movie—the zany Kubrickian farce—are the explicit subject of the second. What we have here is beyond metaphor—it’s a metafive, a satire of satire, a critique of critique.
It’s also a hard movie to write about, especially since one reading of it is that Iñárritu is weaponizing his own hubris and riding it into the ground like Slim Pickens, not worrying about whether or not we’ll love his bomb. To the extent that Digger works, its effectiveness is bound up in the visual and dramatic flourish with which the filmmaker shows his hand. Does it matter whether it’s clean or dirty? Or whether Iñárritu’s all-the-world’s-a-stage conceit is familiar (Asteroid City got there first), labored, or expressed via an inconsistent and at times contradictory visual language? Maybe not across the board, provided you’re on the film’s volatile, oceanic wavelength of multidirectional contempt. Digger punches up and down, left and right; the ratio of jabs to knockouts, though, is suboptimal.
There’s at least one haymaker. Suffice it to say that the overwhelming, all-consuming obnoxiousness of Digger Rockwell, which culminates in a showstopping greed-is-good TED Talk in front of the furious but harmless Europeans of the United Nations, isn’t—only—an excuse for Cruise to go for gold. His centerpiece snake-oil pitch, cribbed more than a little bit from Sideshow Bob’s mayoral campaign (“Deep down inside, you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king!”) fuses A Few Good Men with Les Grossman; it addresses our collective, guilt-driven need for scapegoats and sin-eaters and what it means when entertainers and audiences oblige those impulses. Consumption, says Digger (and Digger), is complicity, and outrage is fuel. If it’s true that the buck stops with the Digger Rockwells of the world, it’s because we’re all willing to pass and then spend it.
There are other provocative notions buried in Digger: the yearning to see reality repackaged as fantasy, the inevitability with which tragedy eventually begets parody, the futility of artists trying to take down targets who belong to the corporate patron class, the reassuring idea that radical art can take anything or anybody down in the first place. The latter pair of paradoxes are crystallized in a cameo by Jesse Plemons as a billionaire with a seemingly different agenda than Digger Rockwell—Plemons does well to make the film’s smallest major role its most ambiguous.
The problem isn’t that Iñárritu’s arguments are baseless, or simplistic; it’s the relentlessness with which he tries to corner them. Making a critique of critique is a good way to insulate oneself from criticism—even as Digger points the finger at itself as a bloated, insufficient gesture, Iñárritu seems to be giving himself and his truth-telling mandate two thumbs up. The comparisons being made to Jean-Luc Godard track, even if the sheer scale of the production complicates any radical aims. Can a white elephant be a Trojan horse? In interviews, Iñárritu has claimed that he was trying to explore the unifying potential of art; his attitude toward the film’s audience, though, represents a complex and aggravating fusion of flattery and condescension. This is very much a movie about Getting It, in both senses of the phrase; we’re being brought in on the joke and made part of the punch line at the same time.
Digger obliges its implied prestige-season audience down a rabbit hole of self-awareness in order to see where the path leads, and it’s nowhere good. That line about “cancer of the asshole” maps the rhetorical territory where Iñárritu has chosen to go spelunking. There’s more scatological humor in Digger than in any recent comedy this side of Jackass Forever: dick jokes and poop jokes in an ignobly picaresque tradition. Still, for all of its immersion in what Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper once called “precious bodily fluids” (do we really need to hear the sound of Cruise peeing over the shot of the Opening Night poster?), the film’s insights about our impending downward spiral are pretty basic—a bitter variation on the bumper-sticker wisdom of “shit happens.”
Yes, it does. Filmmakers like Kubrick and Paul Verhoeven and John Waters have told us this already; Iñárritu is late to the party pooping, but then lateness is part of what he’s talking about. (The whole movie is an 11 o’clock number, sung off-key.) To say Iñárritu is up his own ass without a paddle—or a shovel—is too easy. So is insisting that we Get It, therefore it’s good, or saying that ugly times demand ugly movies. Digger is a colonic, sure, but by the end it’s emptied itself out so fully that there’s nothing left: no urgency, no feeling, no hope. Just a salable fatalism that nobody is buying at the moment, which is, admittedly, fascinating, especially given the film’s ambivalence about the commoditization and consumption of disaster.
It’s a measure of Iñárritu’s determination—his cynical, Digger-like conviction that the ship has not only sailed but sunk—that he leverages his whole enterprise on a joke about the kind of art that endures after the collapse. Turns out that it’s not Shakespeare, as in the sweetly regenerative end-of-days fables of Station Eleven, where a troupe of plague survivors mounts Hamlet as if their lives depend on it. Nor is it Iron Maiden, whose “The Number of the Beast” was deployed so plangently as a signifier of human vitality against the mordant backdrop of The Bone Temple. Nor is it The Simpsons, as in Anne Washburn’s 2012 theater piece, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which brilliantly interrogates how popular entertainment can transubstantiate into authentic mythology—imagine the South Park gag “Simpsons did it” on a cosmic scale. (It’s unclear if Iñárritu, himself a one-time visitor to Springfield, read Washburn’s play before writing his own script; he should do so now, anyway.)
Digger predicts that the bedraggled audiences of the future will be nostalgic for wretched, misanthropic excess. Basically, that they’ll want to watch something like Digger as a release valve for anger and a reminder of where it all went wrong. They certainly don’t want to watch it now, which may not validate Iñárritu's approach but does contextualize it. (To paraphrase George S. Kaufman, satire closes on opening night.) It takes real nerve to make an eco-horror movie designed to look better and more trenchant as things get steadily worse, and which ends by suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that we’re already there. Is the pointlessness the point? Is that a grimace on the movie’s face or a smirk? One condition of truly great satire—the kind that endures and stays thorny—is that it’s destabilizing. The immodest proposals of Digger are surely wobbly and discombobulating, and that’s an achievement. But even with all the imagery of rising coastlines and submerged streets, Iñárritu knows where he resides. He can’t help but remind us that it’s on the little patch of moral high ground reserved for those who Get It (including the part about being part of the problem). We’re invited to join him there, stranded for two hours that feel like an eternity, as intended, choking down the bitter pills we’ve been prescribed by our resident metaphysician. At least we’re not entertained.