‘Digger’ Review: Tom Cruise As a Man Who Lives for Risky Business

Tom Cruise’s press tour for Digger included his first major magazine profile in many years. The piece, by GQ’s Zach Baron, contained plenty of vintage Cruise: Superficially candid but personally guarded; forcefully direct and frustratingly vague.

“I like standing on the edge of a cliff physically and metaphorically,” Cruise told Baron at one point, adding “I’m not afraid to feel afraid.”

True enough. Someone afraid of feeling afraid does not hang off the side of an airplane for the amusement of others. They also don’t play a character like Digger Rockwell, a cartoonish lampoon of capitalism’s worst excesses who races to contain the fallout from his risky business practices. Digger isn’t afraid to feel afraid either, and over the course of his movie he will stand on the edges of cliffs, both literal and metaphorical.

That may be one of the reasons Digger appealed to Cruise, who hasn’t made anything this creatively ambitious or overtly political in almost 20 years. Pondering the Cruise in Digger (and Digger) is one of the more interesting parts of this strange, silly, surprising movie, which is often confounding — but absolutely never boring.

As it begins, Cruise’s bloviating oil baron rouses himself for another day of work while tenderly caring for his elderly cat Maggie. He’s so fixated on his feline’s failing health — her vet declares she has somewhere between “two weeks and five minutes” left to live — that he can barely concern himself with a security issue at his company’s billion-dollar drilling platform near the Arctic. Digger’s underlings recommend shutting the project down in order to fully assess the danger, a cautious approach that doesn’t jive with his drill baby drill attitude.

In the time it takes to give Maggie her morning checkup, the damage is done — for Digger’s platform and maybe the entire planet, as a massive hunk of an Arctic glacier breaks free of the ice shelf and heads toward mainlaind Europe, where it could cause trillions of dollars in damage. (Naturally, Digger and his cohorts think of the devastation purely in terms of monetary losses, not loss of life.) With his company’s top environmental scientist (Riz Ahmed) at his side, Digger struggles to guide the President of the United States (John Goodman) toward the appropriate course of action — not only for the future of the world, but also for the future of Digger’s company and its public reputation.

The rest of the film tries to get at the heart of Cruise’s enigmatic character; a swaggering, arrogant entrepreneur who would blithely compromise our fragile ecosystem while using every available resource at his disposal to save the life of a single sick pet. But the construction of his character by Cruise and co-writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu is so big and broad I’m not sure it really provides any genuine insights into this sort of world-conquering businessman — or into the real Tom Cruise, for that matter.

Iñárritu, who wrote Digger’s script with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman, actually provides an in-film explanation (or at least an in-film excuse) for Digger’s outlandish personality and the film’s ungapatchka production design, which is overloaded with garish paintings of oil derricks and festooned with automatic rifles, looming fireplaces, and assorted hunting trophies. Ultimately, though, the real reason the film and Digger himself are both so over-the-top is because they both come from Iñárritu, one of modern cinema’s most dedicated maximalists.

As evidenced by previous work like Birdman and The Revenant, Iñárritu leaves nothing unsaid that can’t be loudly announced by didactic monologues, elaborate camerawork, or allegories so blunt they might as well be lit by giant flashing neon arrows. Metaphors pour off the screen in Digger: Animals biting the hands that feed them, Trees falling in the woods that no one may be around to hear, and iceburgs that threaten to collide with mankind’s great industrial creations, like the cautionary tale of the Titanic turned inside-out.

Subtlety has no place in this fictional universe. Few actors of the skill and range of John Goodman have ever given a performance as exaggerated as his in Digger; ditto Sandra Huller as Digger’s half-sister who grows increasingly infuriated with her sibling’s questionable decisions. As for Cruise, it’s mostly a very external (if totally committed) performance: The garish clothes, the heavy Southern accent, the wild gray hairdo. It’s cut from the same cloth as his loathsome Hollywood mogul in Tropic Thunder.

There is another side to Cruise’s performance, and Iñárritu gives us brief glimpses of a quieter and more contemplative person than the unbearable windbag who takes center stage most of the time. Cruise and his co-stars shine in those moments. If there were more of them in between the moralizing speeches and tirades, Digger might work a little bit better.

Instead, Digger mostly struggles to become the Dr. Strangelove of climate change, with a dash of Iñárritu’s Birdman thrown in there for not-so-good measure. At Digger’s climax, as its story reaches its most implausibly heightened point, the entire film stops so that a character played by Jesse Plemons can deliver a defensive monologue. He argues talks about corporate malfeasance and environmental protection, but ultimately, his lecture is really there to preempt any audience criticism about Digger’s hyperbolic tone. Plemons essentially wags his finger at the viewer and announces that if they’re not laughing at this heavily caricatured fable — if it felt way too absurd or on the nose — that’s on them. Duly noted!

Ultimately, your mileage with Digger may vary based on how much you like Tom Cruise, and how much you enjoy contemplating his life and career as a movie star and film artist. Now in his 60s, you have to at least appreciate that Cruise has made a bold and eclectic choice of material here. There’s no question the guy playing the tycoon in the combover and big belly is unafraid to feel fear on the set. Because there’s plenty he could have — and maybe should have — been worried about in this case.

Additional Thoughts:

-So much of the marketing for Digger focuses on the character’s shovel. Warner Bros. built a 50-foot tall shovel near Coachella to help kick off the movie’s ad campaign, then released one trailer after another that emphasized Cruise alternately swinging the thing and praying to it. The film’s logo is the word “Digger” holding a shovel! And after all of that, the shovel is ... barely in the movie. A lot of the shots of it from the trailers didn’t even make the film’s final cut. Were they all removed during post-production? Were they created specifically for the trailer because someone thought the shovel was an enticing selling point? I would love to have been a fly on the wall of the marketing meeting at Warners about all of this.

RATING: 5/10