Digger, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Legendary Pictures, 129 minutes

By the time this review is published, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Digger will be a punchline comparable to Michael Cimino’s disastrous western Heaven’s Gate or Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s unpopular remake of The Wages of Fear. Iñárritu’s failure is a classic case of a big studio betting big money on a big film from a big director for only a small reward. The only hope for it now is posterity. These days Heaven’s Gate and Sorcerer are considered neglected masterpieces, in large part because they flopped so hard. Is this to be Digger’s fate? Alas, I fear not. More likely it will join the ranks of Zabriskie Point, Ishtar, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets as movies memorable only for being over-thought and over-budget underperformers.

It is not easy to explain what Digger is about. The film opens on Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an overweight, corrupt oil baron who speaks in an exaggerated Texas accent. He is a humorless caricature of a Bushie Republican: swaggering and jingoistic, an Ugly American. Anyway,  Digger is informed that one of his oil rigs in Greenland has dislodged a piece of the ice cap four times the size of Philadelphia. It is headed toward the North Sea and could put much of Northern Europe underwater. An emergency council is called at Digger’s mansion. In a scene meant to resemble the war room sequence of Doctor Strangelove, President Compson (John Goodman) and his cabinet pepper Digger and his top scientist (Riz Ahmed) with questions about how the United States can wash its hands of responsibility if and when the ice floe rams Europe. At the end of the meeting, Compson takes Digger aside to tell him something personal. “I have cancer of the asshole,” he says.

So far, so stupid. At this point, about half an hour into the film, Iñárritu reveals that his overcooked satire is actually a play within the film. What we have been watching is a dress rehearsal for the critically acclaimed comedy Fossil Fools, which is being revived for its 25th anniversary. The rest of the film cuts back and forth between the events of the play—it is almost pointless to recount them now—and the anxieties of the actors backstage. 

In theory, this is an amusing scenario. And in fact, Iñárritu has successfully pulled off something like it before. But that was all the way back in 2014 when he made Birdbrain—I mean, Birdman—a film where an actor (Michael Keaton), who once played a superhero (a riff on Batman), attempts a late-career revival by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Birdman was a High Obamist exercise in pretension. Still, it was amusing and charming, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard at his very best.

Digger, on the other hand, is more like Godard in his usual mode, that is, his very worst. “I feel disconnected,” Curtis Markson (also Cruise), the actor playing Digger, tells the director of the play. Through the gradual unfolding of the story—if we may abuse the term—we learn that the events depicted in Fossil Fools are more or less factual. The ice floe rammed Europe and set off a chain reaction of environmental catastrophes that poisoned the air and put much of the world underwater. Compson died of rectal cancer. Digger was exiled to an oil rig in balmy Alaska where he drowned himself in the toxic sea. Markson feels disconnected from all this action because he believes the global tragedy should not be presented as “funny.” Even at the remove of more than 30 years, he is still traumatized by it. Besides, he has an environmental crisis of his own: His daughter, en route to New York to see the opening of his play, has been caught in a “Category 6” hurricane and he fears for her life.     

Iñárritu clearly intends the play within the film to be unfunny, tasteless schlock. And he intends Markson’s ambivalence about its tone as a commentary on limits of satire. So what if you make fun of the crude oilman? The world is underwater. No amount of laughing can change that fact. It’s a facile point, and critics have rightly lambasted Iñárritu for sinking more than $120 million into making it at the tedious length of two hours and eight minutes. And audiences have rightly punished him for refusing to pay $20 to see it on the big screen. 

But there’s something more cynical going on in Digger that has gone largely unnoticed. In the final half hour of the movie, a mysterious character named Kenny (Jesse Plemons) steps out of the shadows and delivers a monologue that completely changes how we are to understand the movie. Kenny, we have learned earlier in the film, is the play’s producer. He owns a technology company—something akin to Palantir—and has promised to find Curtis’s daughter. Now, just as the curtain is about to go up on opening night, he reveals that he is also Digger’s nephew, and he states that he is bankrolling the production as a way of helping the world process its collective trauma. He insists to Curtis that he must play his role as comedy. “It’s funny and it’s stupid and it’s scary and it makes no goddam sense,” he says. “But it happened.” 

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

Plemons delivers the speech with an eerie earnestness, almost like a threat. Curtis acquiesces. He has to: This is the guy who is going to find his daughter, after all. And when the curtain goes down—when the audience roars with laughter at the drowned oil baron—Kenny calls Curtis. His daughter is safe. The theater doors open up, and everyone departs happily into the devastated, flooded world outside.

This is the real satire of Digger. The movie isn’t about oilmen and it’s not about artists fretting over their impotence. It’s about greenwashing. This is an ugly neologism, but it’s wonderfully descriptive. Some oil company, some defense technology firm, some intelligence service cleans itself of its sins by funding an opera or a symphony orchestra or a Broadway theater production. This is essentially what Kenny has done. The uncle caused the crisis, and the nephew profits off it. But his conscience can remain clear because he also puts his money behind high-minded pursuits. Kenny is Iñárritu’s real target, but by the time the director aims at him, most people in the audience will have nodded off.   

Too bad. Even Godard at his very worst is better than no Godard at all. If history is any guide, we won’t be seeing Iñárritu working with a budget this big ever again. Nor will we have the pleasure of watching Tom Cruise don a fatsuit and fling obscenities at the president of the United States.