By James Kenney
Digger is an intriguing, unpleasant, satiric, angry, despairing, clever and overlong mashup of Asteroid City and Vanilla Sky, which has made headlines because it’s not making any money despite starring and being produced by Tom Cruise, although having seen the film I can’t imagine how it would. Not in our current culture, where Twitter maniacs are outraged when I show hostility to Mike Flanagan’s unctuous Carrie remake, in which what was once a tragic figure has been defanged so that we can “root” for her or whatever we’re supposed to do in the 21st century with our protagonists.
Well, no one is going to root for Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, the aging American oil oligarch who is single-handedly destroying the world through his willful ignorance of the environmental cost of his relentless pursuit of wealth and power. When a catastrophe of his own making threatens the planet, Digger embarks on a frantic, increasingly absurd mission to convince the world that he alone can save humanity from the disaster he has unleashed. And it’s heartening to see Cruise throw himself so wholeheartedly into this part (he is on screen for, say, 99.5% of the film). To say Cruise is “great” doesn’t quite cover it; the film is wholly unimaginable without him, and if this was his effort to win an Oscar, he deserves it, as much as anyone deserves those silly things. Acting is not a competition, damn it!
But Cruise on set seems to realize it, as he goes toe-to-to with Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and others, and despite a certain flamboyance to his performance, can’t be seen to be trying to steal attention from these pros, who are also fantastic. Here are no indications he’s trying to steal scenes from Goodman, which is not the Cruise I encountered in Top Gun some forty years ago, when he seemed so wound up in himself, so conscious of his own movie-star charisma, that he could barely share the screen with another actor without snapping at their nose with his glow-in-the-dark teeth.
Despite that movie-star self-regard, he’s an actor I respect and root for, largely because he’s likable or at least magnetic on camera, maybe even more largely because he came of age alongside all the other young actors of the ’80s, when I was first embracing cinema as my own. Truly excellent in Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut and American Made, yet smirky, affected and shallow in the original Top Gun, Cocktail and Days of Thunder, and often somewhere in between (more good than bad, but always in danger of preening) in The Firm, A Few Good Men, etc.
Consider Jack Reacher, in which Cruise gives a consistently assured, admirably unshowy performance, but the Cruise-produced film can’t resist having every female character regard him with something approaching awe, even requiring the later Oscar-nominated actress like Rosamund Pike to go weak in the knees and practically lose the power of speech when he has the audacity to appear before her without a shirt. Oh, Tom!
But like all good aging actors, he has developed sinews, and if he was a callow youth, well, so was his idol Paul Newman in things like From the Terrace. It’s an encouraging sign in a rich movie star when he gets tougher with age, and generally in the 21st century Cruise has honed the good parts of his persona while shedding the smirkiness, so that in Top Gun: Maverick, the belated sequel to Top Gun, he and the movie are both much better than the original, if lacking the original’s zeitgeist-defining success, which somehow transcended the fact that it was, after all, rather daft.
However, by becoming an action kingpin with his Mission: Impossible films and Jack Reacher (and the excellent Edge of Tomorrow and underrated Oblivion), something was lost. He has maintained his superstar status and became more consistently credible as an actor while generally picking projects that don’t test him much as an actor. The one recent exception was Doug Liman’s American Made, a very good true-life story of a pilot in over his head with the international drug trade, in which Cruise stayed in character, didn’t grandstand, and ended up in a film that stalled at about $50 million at the domestic box office and didn’t win any awards. Fine by me, but he perhaps thought “that was close” before returning to increasingly creatively diminished but lucrative Mission: Impossible sequels.
Well, that $50 mil looks good now, as Digger is likely to stall at somewhere around ten domestically, which is a shame, because it’s a reminder that people don’t particularly like to be challenged by their art anymore (gee, why didn’t Brian De Palma make Carrie more nice and less culpable for her actions?!?!). I was willing to give Digger a chance because, despite all the bad advance word, I couldn’t imagine a film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Cruise not being an honorable attempt to make something great, which is enough, especially at this late date when most everything produced by Hollywood feels comprimised and committe-driven, and I plunged in.
The film certainly is odd, with a fairly static, talky beginning and a lot of (funny if grotesque) business involving a disturbing-looking animatronic cat representing Digger’s 30-year-old pet, suggesting that peculiar way so many unempathetic, self-involved right-wingers can form a deep connection to an animal, a relationship that offers them love from a creature that is cute, dependent and can’t talk back, while they shrug off the deaths of thousands due to flooding and famine.
And while I’m at it, Cruise’s Digger is fairly disgusting himself, but the film, which starts intriguingly enough, actually grows more fascinating as it progresses, certainly an encouraging sign in a self-consciously arty construct with some rug-pulling developments sprinkled throughout its narrative. But they pay off, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: the film is considerably more fascinating in its final 45 minutes than in its first, which are plenty offbeat and effective in their own right.
Digger is exceptional, and committed to the bit (as is Cruise); it’s “the bit” that will likely alienate the majority of filmgoers, although I wish a few more of the people who slavishly praise Cruise every time an M:I or Top Gun film comes out would commit to their own bits and show up to support the guy when he attempts (and wholly succeeds) at doing something original, unclassifiable and downright subversive (subversive to what? To his image as an apolitical grinner, the kind who will keep the villainous country combatting the U.S. in Top Gun: Maverick anonymous so as not to offend anyone or close down any potential markets).
Let’s just say I rolled my eyes at the announcement earlier this year of the Days of Thunder rehash/sequel/remake he’ll be doing with Anne Hathaway in 2028. Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder is a rather bad film and we don’t need Cruise to rehash every random film he made in the past. Why not a Cocktail or The Firm sequel? But now, having seen Digger, and seen its non-response, he’s earned his next artistically dubious, potentially commercial attempt at movie-star maintenance. I apologize for mocking Days of Thunder Rehash or whatever it ends up being called. Digger is nuts in the best possible way, and Cruise leads with his chin in it. Good for him.
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