Digger Review: Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Misfire

Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise were made for each other, if no one else. One is a cinematic daredevil whose films are fueled by the tension between ego and mortality — a mad virtuoso obsessed with staging elaborate stunts that externalize his inner being into the stuff of outsized spectacle, and do so with a kamikaze effortfulness so extreme that even (or especially) their most grandiose work can make it seem like the person behind them is hiding from reality instead of rendering it larger than life. The other is Tom Cruise.

By different means, toward different ends, both men have consistently risked their creative and/or actual lives as they’ve reckoned with the limits of what they can accomplish with a movie camera. Through projects like “Birdman,” “Bardo,” and the “Mission: Impossible” sequels, both men have dedicated the most recent stretch of their careers to blurring the line between the art and the artist. Not as a bid to elide some kind of moral reckoning (easy as it is to see Cruise’s ascension into “The Savior of Movies” as a calculated rebrand), but rather as an effort to explore — or transcend — the relationship between reality and the stories that people choose to tell about themselves.

In that light, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Iñárritu and Cruise finally combined their powers/personas to make the ultimate movie about self-delusion. And so we arrive at “Digger,” a raw and modest little movie that has no ambition beyond poking some fun at the absurdity of its own existence.

Just kidding. LOL. ROTFL, even. The third chapter in a loose trilogy of postmodern films examining the value of creativity at a time when reality has become stranger than fiction, “Digger” is a mega-budget “Dr. Strangelove” riff so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie — a VistaVision satire so high-concept that it would be more accurate to measure its running time in altitude than minutes.

Like “Birdman” and “Bardo” before it, Iñárritu’s biggest swing (and most endearing folly) self-reflexively hinges upon the various ways that people make sense of living in a world that has abandoned its logic. An $125 million+ Brechtian funhouse that’s been constructed with the craft of a basilica and the obviousness of a bad “SNL” cold open, “Digger” uses its ostensible premise — a trillionaire oil tycoon who doesn’t give a shit about climate change triggers an ecological catastrophe with his name all over it — to plumb the myopia that’s defined the 21st century, and might also be required to survive it.

To say that Iñárritu’s characteristically belabored script (co-written by Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone) reinvents itself at the end of its first and second acts would be the kind of understatement that the “Babel” director has never been capable of, but it’s safe to say that “Digger” sustains a clear, meta-textual interest in its central idea: The world is deteriorating faster than our collective imagination can keep up. They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, and this is a film that fracks that equation for every molecule of hot air that it can — a film that laughs at our compulsion to narrativize the past at the same time as it awes at our failure to appreciate how fucked things have gotten in the present.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote; Iñárritu counters that we might just kill ourselves in the process. With “Digger,” he’s finally identified self-delusion as the world’s most valuable resource.

What else can I say about this movie without revealing its secrets? Tom Cruise is Digger, that much I can tell you. Digger Rockwell, to be precise. Equal parts Les Grossman, Daniel Plainview, and Foghorn Leghorn, Digger is basically a pair of whiskey-soaked finger-guns made flesh, and Cruise — ensconced inside Kazu Hiro’s seamless latex prosthetics, which include wrinkly jowls and a serious paunch — inhabits the guy with the same physical commitment that made Ethan Hunt into such a living spectacle. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actor require so many decrepit flourishes just to play a character who’s roughly his same age, but his performance works as intended even when you bump against the Tom Cruise of it all, and there’s no denying the thrill of watching him apply his signature intensity to a role as strange as this one.

Like most people who are rich enough to do so, Digger lives in a cloistered world of his own design, to the point that his Xanadu-like mansion has framed paintings for windows, his antler-horned mirrors reflect his image to infinity, and world leaders come to him so that he doesn’t have to leave the house. His cat Maggie is a 30-year-old Khao Manee who looks as if she’s been rotting in his lap for the better part of a decade, but Digger refuses to accept the fact that she might die one day, even though it seems like she already has.

Digger likewise refuses to accept that any harm might come from the “small” crack his crew has caused in the Arctic ice shelf, but that changes — or at least threatens to — after a methane fireball erupts from the ground, kills everyone at the outpost, and sends a “Manhattan-sized” chunk of Greenland speeding toward Europe (the constantly changing comps used to describe the iceberg’s girth is one of this movie’s only digestible jokes). The next thing we know, the rectal cancer-stricken President of the United States — a red-cheeked John Goodman, making his performance in “Barton Fink” seem like a model of restraint — has set up an impromptu SCIF in Digger’s war room, and a small army of Pete Hegseth caricatures (along with a misused Michael Stuhlbarg as the vice president) have gathered to discuss nuking the mass with as little personal fallout as possible. If they could enter the launch codes with their dicks, they would.

The Major T.J. “King” Kong” vibes are strong, even if these scenes are scripted with a political acuity that cleaves closer to Ed Sheeran than Terry George. (The movie later doubles back to insist that these scenes are meant to be unfunny, a claim that would carry more weight if the scenes were anything else on purpose instead.) Riz Ahmed is there, entombed in his role as a frazzled scientific advisor who recognizes the severity of the situation. Sandra Hüller occasionally sneers in from the sidelines as well, the “Toni Erdmann” legend acquitting herself well in the underwritten role of Digger’s half-sister, in part because the movie invites her to act above it all — it’s not her most demanding work.

Eventually, after a patience-thinning 30 minutes that’s only enlivened by the simple slapstick of people tripping over Digger’s shovel, the fuller scope of Iñárritu’s vision is revealed, and the movie graduates from the soft targets of its opening act (e.g. environmental pillaging, apocalyptic chauvinism, god-king strongmen) to the more abstract and self-involved concerns I alluded to above: most of all the extent to which narrative has become the prevailing force in our world, both individually and on a global scale. “Digger” opens up a new plot thread in its second act — one that it visits far too briefly, and that I missed every time the movie returned to the dead-end story of its eponymous tycoon, who basically spends the rest of his screentime doing damage control for his character in lieu of being able to mitigate the disaster he’s caused.

As with every time that “Digger” heightens its concept even further into the stratosphere, this big reveal — which is neither the last of its kind, nor the most satisfying — is accompanied by a strange whiff of self-deprecation; whenever Iñárritu’s opus expands its scope, it does so in a way that knowingly calls attention to the disconnect between the film’s exertion and its lack of impact. Dennis Gassner’s extraordinary production design, Emmanuel Lubezki’s Bruegel-esque cinematography, Cosmo Sheldrake’s off-kilter music (a throwback to the days when every Kaufman-like comedy required a Jon Brion score), and the rest of the impeccable craftwork are all in service to a movie that constantly questions its own value in the face of its story’s extinction-level events.

The beauty of the craftwork allows those questions the chance to feel sincere instead of self-serving, but — and please stop me if you’ve heard this one before — Iñárritu’s grandiosity makes it impossible for him to pose them on a human scale. The ideas are seldom the problem in his films. On the contrary, the issue once again is that his spectacle-driven simulacra is rooted in the lies we tell ourselves rather than the truths we hope to bury underneath them, and so his hyper-conceptual comedies invariably seem as if they’re built on the watery quicksand of a mixed metaphor.

True to form, “Digger” is a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat, with Iñárritu frantically hoping to pile them tall enough that they stand on their own without tipping over. That anxiety is endemic to the comedy in his films, which has never been more exasperating than it is here. As in “Birdman,” Iñárritu tries to combine the time signature of a “New Yorker” cartoon with the syncopation of a nervous breakdown (or at least a Howard Hawks movie), and the whole movie feels out of tune as a result. To paraphrase the great Kyle Cooke, “Digger” should be fun, but it’s not even funny, and the sweaty clumsiness of its punchlines and sight gags only serve to make the script’s galaxy-brained satire feel more like the stuff of an IMAX-sized JibJab cartoon.

Iñárritu unsurprisingly fares better when he trades slapstick for Hieronymous Bosch-like surrealism during the middle portion of “Digger,” which more fully embraces the whole Roy Andersson on steroids aesthetic of a pallid movie in which everyone looks as ashen and half-dead as Digger’s cat. These sequences are no less contrived than the rest of this malformed blockbuster, but their growing emphasis on performativeness helps to paint a target that Iñárritu actually knows how to hit.

“Digger” peaks with a purgatorial scene in which Cruise saunters through a crowded assembly hall of the damned and monologues — for something like 10 straight minutes — about the disconnect between our hatred toward oligarchs like him, and our dependence they afford the masses to “bask in the comfort of [our] unremarkable lives.” Not only is it the closest we’ll ever come to seeing America’s definitive movie star do Broadway, but it also resonates with the meta-narrative of Cruise’s screen career. The Digger Rockwell of Planet Hollywood, Cruise was (partially) to blame for the bigger is better culture that led us to a place where a single blockbuster miscalculation could threaten the entire studio system. And like the character he plays here, Cruise has credibly made the case that he’s the only person capable of digging us out of that mess.

If “Digger” bombs as hard as I fear it will, it may prove to be a more damning portrait of self-delusion than Iñárritu ever intended.

Then again, the reason why “Digger” is a nobler and more rewarding failure than “Birdman” or “Bardo” is because it doesn’t have to pretend that Digger Rockwell is a real person. He’s a living cartoon who’s exempted from the human foundation that was missing from those earlier films, and — for all of this movie’s psych-outs and detours — that allows Iñárritu to address his existential crises with a greater directness and degree of relatability. You wouldn’t believe where “Digger” goes even if I spelled it out with full spoilers, but its darkly (and at least somewhat inadvertently) hilarious final shot delivers on the essence of a future-facing movie about how readily we have to normalize the absurdity of the present in order to endure it — a movie that extrapolates a wry and all too real vision of mass psychosis from the self-delusion of its own making.

Grade: C+

Warner Bros. will release “Digger” in theaters on Friday, October 2.