For a film that feels so bang average, the framing and reframing Digger as a must-see because you have to make up your own mind about it feels like (unsuccessful) damage limitation. Having finally sat through it, I must confess I don’t think it is deserving of the ‘dumpster fire’ label some people have awarded it. That said, it gives so much of what we’ve already seen from Hollywood, ideologically, that it’s hardly worthy of its ‘divisive’ reputation either; front-loaded with a disempowering pessimism which centres entirely on the faltering empire of the United States, even as elsewhere political movements show a better world is still possible.
As the muddled press tour of Digger may have warned you, the film is many things. A comedy is not one of them. The trailer led people to believe it would be – and that is one reason it might have also attracted such a sharp response from its detractors. Most of the time, the writing feels trite, with on-the-nose jokes about the buffoonery of modern politicians, and the insanity of business leaders whose first concern is at every turn, not “how many people will die?”, but “how much will this cost me?” And spoilers, it’s supposed to be trite, because (more spoilers) none of this is real.
Oil magnate Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, who can only be described as recognisable, having made far too much of his ‘transformation’ of this role), and President Compson (a haggard hybrid of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, played by a sickly John Goodman) stand in contemplation. Thousands of miles away, a glacier dislodged by Digger’s oil rigs in Greenland threatens to collide with, and flood, Western Europe. Casualties will be colossal; but warning Europe means the US may have to take responsibility for its actions… Thinking about life and death, the pair stare balefully out of the window – before the tree in the centre of the garden topples over, and a seemingly gigantic man emerges from the undergrowth to fix the miniature that apparently could not withstand the wind-machine just off-stage.
It wasn’t much of a surprise to be honest. The view from the window has never looked anything but artificial – and not in a ‘suspend your disbelief for Ray Harryhausen’s monsters’ kind of a way, but in a ‘look, we’re doing a thing, aren’t we clever’ kind of a way.
Alejandro G Iñárritu directed and co-wrote this movie – and if anything, it’s very on-brand for him. Lots of knowing winks to the audience, lifting of the curtain, talk about how the sausage is made – as in Birdman – coupled with the abject misery of The Revenant. So, if you saw those films and liked them, you will get more of the same here. If you found those films a slog, the same applies.
Pleased with itself
One of the main problems for me, though, is that Iñárritu is just so proud of this, that he dedicates far too much time and effort to breaking the fourth wall. The meat of the film – the ‘stage play’ being hosted to recount a ‘real’ apocalyptic event caused in full view of the world by corporate interests and governments – becomes less interesting the more of his hand he shows. But even so, it remains the place we spend most of our time.
By the time we reach the major Shyamalanian ‘twist’ in the final act, things have become a drag, punctuated by two-or-three genuinely interesting moments. Those moments alone are worth exploring. Particularly the idea (which I have even heard in some parts of the American left) that climate change is bad, but won’t really impact anywhere beyond the Global South – even as storms and wildfires turn the States inside out. But these themes could, quite easily, have been distilled into a successful 30-minute short that didn’t cost a gazillion dollars, and didn’t require Tom Cruise to prove in excruciating detail what we already knew – that he is not Peter Sellers.
The problem is, that version of Digger could never happen, because short cinema doesn’t carry the kind of prestige in America that a Hollywood feature does, however bloated and mis-advertised it was. In that sense, Iñárritu somewhat undermines one of his core takeaways: the story is supposed to skewer American liberals (and specifically them, because rather predictably, the film has zero interest in showing how the rest of the world fares through all this), who could sit through an apocalypse, but whose humour would still be marooned in the era of late night television satire.
Stroking their chins while sitting in a dystopian hell, they can laugh at the absurdity of an ancient and infirm President trying to go to war with an iceberg – in between battles with his dentures, and his bowels – or an oil baron so deeply under the spell of his own ideological slurry that he thinks he can spin his way out of an Armageddon of his making. And that is one of the more interesting aspects of the movie. (One which, probably, alienated a large portion of the only people in America who would have gone to bat for it in the first place, but credit for knowingly going there anyway.)
When you go so inescapably mainstream with it all, though, it undermines the project. In part, because you can’t browbeat someone for engaging with something you have constructed, in the medium and venue that you asked them to receive your message in. Not without coming across as a lecturing bore, anyway. And Digger very much does that – feeling like a joyless Doctor Strangelove, in which you’re actively derided for laughing at the jokes (not that there is much danger of that).
Possibly the funniest thing about the film to that end, is that Iñárritu has written a film to belittle audiences, “Hey, the world is literally ending, how can you be consuming that as casual entertainment in a cinema?” has largely been delivered to empty cinemas. But that Schadenfreude aside, even if this were playing to a full house, it’s not clear what Iñárritu wants us to do instead – or indeed that he is aware people are doing things.
Satire is not pointless
In Digger’s world, presidential committees, councils of the international community, and corporate boardrooms are the places where change can or cannot take place. There are some clips of riots in Europe (hideous, generative AI animations, which the film seems to rather cynically have pre-empted critique for in a climactic speech by Digger), but they might as well have been on Mars – they have no weight or meaning, and receive no attention. That’s not politics I guess – in part, because it would probably make the money behind this movie kind of uncomfortable if we thought about it that way.
Meanwhile, in that same world, art, or more specifically satire, is painted as a pointless endeavour, giving us a bread and circuses distraction, making us feel like someone is being held to account because Seth Meyers called them a name, or Saturday Night Live did a silly impression of them – so now we can just go back to work the next day, as long as we’re wearing out nuclear fallout gear in the call centre. That comes from a misunderstanding of where politics actually happens, and how art and satire can help energise collective efforts for change.
Chaplin showing The Great Dictator as anything other than an untouchable god, playing with his insecurities to examine the vein and paranoid oaf behind the propaganda was important. Beyond the Fringe’s skewering of Harold MacMillan rendered the prime minister a laughing stock, and encouraged the public not to hold political leaders in high esteem, but to ridicule and belittle them if they weren’t working in their interests. Satire in its most combative forms has impact – it encourages us to take direct action against the fallible and obscene individuals at the head of our crumbling society. It encourages grassroots movements, emboldened by the idea they don’t simply need to wait for the lunatics leading the asylum to come to their senses. And while it is true that no movement has yet succeeded in averting the climate crisis, to assume nobody is trying – and indeed to negate all their efforts outside the glossy corridors of power – while berating them for inaction is dishonest. Not least because in Brazil, Lula and PT13 have pulled off the mother of all comebacks, to ensure that a political movement (which has reduced deforestation in the Amazon to its lowest level in decades), will not be replaced by the chainsaw-wielding fascists of the Bolsonarite dynasty (Flavio is the son of Jair, under whom deforestation surged up by 60%, while attacks on journalists, activists and indigenous people opposing that just so happened to sky-rocket).
In that context, Digger feels particularly cynical in its hopelessness – ultimately offering the opposite of satire: the chance for the ruling class to wash its hands of guilt because the rest of us, allegedly, are simply idling in the cinema, chuckling at Tom Cruise in a fat suit. And that shouldn’t even be a surprise – this project feels so hollow, because Iñárritu is still so plainly beholden to the elites his work positions itself in critique to. He did not need to spend $180 million to make this movie. And judging from the pitiful $42 million box office revenue the film brought in, the supposed might of the studio system – or the alleged star-power of Cruise – was not something which helped get eyes on his message. Still, here we are, with a film paid for and approved by some of the richest people in the world’s leading polluter.
The result is a largely inoffensive piece of prestige cinema, in which the blandest assets of the Hollywood industrial complex have been mixed into a creamy vinegarette of a feature; assembled to browbeat the audience, rather than the powers that be – who often just so happen to be investing heavily in the studio system. Digger is not some innovative act of truth-telling, whatever its window dressing suggested. It is rather just more of what we have come to expect from the cinematic establishment for the last half-century: a deflection of culpability from the movie’s paymasters, to deliver something which is supposed to sound edgy, sound like criticism, but ultimately reinforces the terrible state of things.
For all the discussion of whether you would love it or hate it, this isn’t Marmite. It’s ranch dressing.
