Satire has always been one of the more intricate genres in film because there’s such a fine line between being clever and being completely full of yourself. When it doesn’t work, you can feel the filmmaker practically elbowing you in the ribs, desperately making sure you understand the joke or whatever grand statement they’re attempting to make. But when satire works? When a filmmaker finds that perfect balance between absurdity, comedy, and something genuinely meaningful underneath it all, those films tend to stick around and, in some cases, become all-timers. If I’m being completely transparent, though, I’ve never really been a satire guy. It’s a style of filmmaking that I can appreciate more than I necessarily love, and there are plenty of celebrated satires that simply don’t hit me the way they do everyone else.
That’s partially what made Digger such an interesting film for me heading into it. Alejandro G. Iñárritu has always been a filmmaker whose work I’ve mostly enjoyed because, even when he’s pushing things to their limits, there’s an ambition and fearlessness behind those choices that I can appreciate. Throw Tom Cruise into that equation and suddenly my curiosity goes through the roof. We’ve spent decades watching Cruise throw himself off cliffs, hang off airplanes and basically risk his life for our entertainment, so the idea of watching one of our last true movie stars step this far outside of his comfort zone immediately made Digger one of my most anticipated films. I just never expected the result to leave me this conflicted.
Digger is a fascinating mixed bag that I’m still trying to fully wrap my head around. Tom Cruise delivers a masterful, completely committed performance that reminds you just how damn good he is when asked to step outside the action-star persona that has defined this stage of his career. Iñárritu’s satire doesn’t always land, but there’s an undeniable ambition behind every bizarre choice that kept me invested even when I wasn’t entirely on its wavelength. And then there’s that third act, where Digger takes a Swing with a capital “S,” delivering a massive twist that has the potential to completely recontextualize everything that came before it. It’s the kind of choice that may ultimately make or break the entire movie for people, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly where I land on it, but the sheer boldness of the swing alone may be worth the price of admission.
Digger centers on Digger Rockwell, an eccentric, larger-than-life oil tycoon whose enormous wealth and influence have positioned him as one of the most powerful men in the world. But when his relentless pursuit of expansion results in a catastrophic disaster that threatens humanity itself, Digger suddenly finds himself racing against the clock to fix the very mess he helped create. What follows is Iñárritu’s satirical examination of wealth, power, ego, and the absurdity of a man attempting to position himself as the solution to a catastrophe he was responsible for creating in the first place.
Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and co-writers Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman craft a screenplay that attempts to channel the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, though the results prove far more inconsistent. What made that film’s satire so effective is that the comedy rarely felt like it was trying to remind you that it was satire. Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George constructed absurd situations, but everyone living within those situations treated them with an earnest seriousness. While Digger’s screenplay is crafted in a similar fashion, it too often comes across as a “try-hard,” where you, as the audience, can practically feel the jokes and commentary being placed with that built-in pause for laughter. At my screening, many of those pauses were instead met with silence, which only further highlighted the inconsistency of the journey.
Where the screenplay’s true make-or-break moment comes, however, is within its twist. It’s a twist I found fascinating in terms of how it recontextualizes the film’s themes and introduces the idea that “satire masks sadness, anger and frustration.” In the case of Digger, that idea correlates with our current state of affairs in more ways than one, which I dare not spoil here. It adds an entirely different layer to everything we’ve just watched and leaves you wrestling with the notion that, eventually, celebration will outlast the mourning. IYKYK.
If there’s one element of Digger that never wavers, it’s Tom Cruise’s commitment to going full throttle with every single choice. Cruise takes the larger-than-life absurdity of his Tropic Thunder counterpart Les Grossman and blends it with some of civilization’s most arrogant and grotesque tycoons to create a character who is equal parts hilarious, repulsive, and completely captivating. There are no half-measures here, and Cruise understands exactly what kind of movie he’s in, fully embracing every ridiculous extreme whether the material around him connects or not. With all the awards conversation already surrounding Cruise and his chances with Digger, there’s one sequence that immediately feels destined to become his “Oscar scene”: a roughly seven-to-eight-minute monologue that gives Cruise the runway to remind everyone that beneath the movie-star persona, death-defying stunts and decades of spectacle is one hell of an actor. It’s Cruise completely unleashed, and regardless of where you land on Digger as a whole, his commitment is never in question.
The supporting players are mostly effective in navigating the madness surrounding Cruise, though John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Sandra Hüller aren’t given nearly as much to do as you’d hope considering the caliber of talent involved. Each makes the most of their limited opportunities, but if there’s a true standout among the supporting ensemble, it’s Riz Ahmed. Ahmed matches Cruise’s intensity at full throttle, providing some wonderful back-and-forth as the two consistently feed off one another’s energy. Going toe-to-toe with Cruise operating at this level is no easy task, but Ahmed never gets swallowed up by the sheer size of Cruise’s performance and instead proves more than capable of matching him beat for beat.
On the technical side, Cosmo Sheldrake makes his feature-film scoring debut with Digger, and while there’s certainly a distinct eccentricity to his work that fits within the bizarre wavelength Iñárritu is operating on, the score never fully worked for me. Much like the film’s satire itself, there were moments where the music felt as though it was working overtime to emphasize the absurdity rather than naturally complementing what was happening on screen. It’s certainly unique and very much in tune with the strange world of Digger, but it ultimately became another element of the film I admired more for what it was attempting than how it landed for me.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, however, continues to stand among some of the best work being done today. Reuniting with Iñárritu, Lubezki once again demonstrates his remarkable understanding of color, movement and scale, crafting images perfectly suited to Digger’s own grandiose ambitions. Whether capturing the enormity of the world surrounding him or visually emphasizing a man who views himself as larger than that world, Lubezki’s choices consistently match the massive scope of what Iñárritu is attempting. But it’s within the film’s third act where his work takes on an entirely different life, as the massive twist allows Lubezki to shift the film’s visual language in a way that feels both jarring and purposeful. Without venturing into spoiler territory, the use of color and scale becomes even more essential to what Iñárritu is ultimately trying to say, with images that suddenly carry a different weight once the true nature of Digger begins to reveal itself.
In the end, Digger is every bit as messy, bizarre, frustrating, and fascinating as you’d expect from Iñárritu taking on material like this. As someone who has never been the biggest fan of satire, there were plenty of moments where the film reinforced exactly why the genre can be such a difficult balancing act for me. The jokes don’t always land, the commentary can feel like it’s screaming at you rather than trusting you to find it, and certain choices worked far better for me in retrospect than they did in the moment. Yet there’s something strangely admirable about a movie this committed to its own madness, especially when you have Tom Cruise delivering one of the most fearless performances of his career at the center of it all.
And maybe that’s ultimately where Digger leaves me. I’m not sure I loved the journey, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about where it eventually took me. That third-act reveal is going to inspire conversations, arguments, and wildly different interpretations, and suddenly so much of what came before it demands to be reconsidered through an entirely different lens. For a film about a man desperate to leave his mark on the world, perhaps it’s fitting that Digger seems equally determined to leave one on its audience. Whether that mark ultimately looks like brilliance or a giant misfire will depend entirely on the person watching, but sometimes there’s something worthwhile about a movie willing to dig a hole this deep and leave you to decide what the hell you just found at the bottom.
