★★ (2 out of 4)
I’ve been waiting decades to see Tom Cruise, 64, seize the role that would earn him his first and long overdue Oscar. After seeing “Digger,” I’m still waiting. It’s not that Cruise doesn’t chow down on the role of paunchy, preening, tantrum-throwing Texas oil powerbroker Digger Rockwell; he rips into every scene in a fervor to masticate even a scrap of artistic red meat from a script that won’t put out. The role has everything Oscar usually loves—a fat suit, facial prosthetics (from the great Kazu Hiro), a pet kitty, bombastic speeches, an out of left field plot twist, and an actor eager to show what he’s got. He’s got plenty. The movie, not so much.
“Digger” has provided Cruise all the trimmings that a $125 million budget could buy: a two-time Oscar-winning director in Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“The Revenant,” “Birdman”), who wrote the bloody mess of a script with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone. A superb cinematographer in three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, shooting in VistaVision to catch—what!—a fading world in bilious green. The major plus on the tech side is the stunning production design of Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson. Yes, there is something good to say about “Digger.”
A fine cast is misused and abused. Everyone from Sandra Hüller as Digger’s shouting half-sister to John Goodman as a windbag POTUS dying of what he calls “cancer of the asshole” has been encouraged to overact shamelessly. The waste of such gifted actors as Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons really hurts. Those who defy the urge to showboat come off best, notably Riz Ahmed as Dr. Ganesh, Digger’s chief scientist who warns his boss that his reckless drilling is triggering an environmental catastrophe that releases a methane fireball and sends a chunk of Greenland speeding toward Europe.
What’s Digger to do? Lie about it, of course, and pretend he will be the world’s savior. That means having the President and all his corrupt men to his mansion, inhabited by the only love of Digger’s life, Maggie the cat, an incontinent, half-blind 30-year-old Khao Manee who looks like she’s rotting away from the inside. Nearly everyone in this film looks the same sickly way, though Maggie is played by an animatronic robot.
The clanking symbolism is as deadening as the decibel level is deafening. Cruise starts over the top with no place to go, though he delivers the unholy hell out of one big speech about political hypocrisy. “You can’t handle the truth,” he rants. OK, he doesn’t paraphrase the Jack Nicholson role in his own “A Few Good Men.” But he might as well have. “You blame me for supplying the oil, but you keep demanding it,” he continues. “Deep down inside you want me to keep pounding! You want two-day delivery of shit that you don’t need! Oil is what we have! Oil is what God gave us! Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!” Credit Cruise for one thing: he states the obvious with a real sense of discovery as Digger weaponizes his grandpap’s shovel, the one that struck crude oil back in 1917.
Tom Cruise is eager to show what he’s got. He’s got plenty. The movie, not so much.
Spoiler Alert: Just when you think this film could not get any more pompous and self-indulgent, a change erupts half an hour in and we’re in a stage play called “Fossil Fools” and Cruise is actor Curtis Markson starring in the role of Digger and complaining to the director (Sophie Wilde) about how impossible it is play of such outsized comedy and drama.
Reviewers are instructed to reveal no more since there are other twists ahead. There are indeed and none manage to enlighten or entertain. Frustrate and annoy is more like it. Clearly, Cruise and his team of creative satirists wanted to design a slapstick tragedy that might suggest the depths of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” Instead, the result ends in the shallows along with such bloated recent debacles as Francis Coppola’s “Megalopolis” or Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” or David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam.” For me, “Digger” feels like a movie that lost its way in the battle of ego vs artistry. The ads refer to “Digger” as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.” They got it half right.