But not all complicated movies are great, and some directors can’t distinguish between the act of making a meaningful picture and pulling off an elaborate parlor trick. Digger, the eighth feature film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is pure, empty-headed trickery, a drab-looking gewgaw with a million moving parts and nothing to say, even if it desperately claws at profundity every minute.
Big oil is killing the planet! Human beings are in a pickle! You can believe all these things are true and still find Digger pathetically unpersuasive; it’s so thematically clumsy, even within the ostensible razzle-dazzle of its filmmaking, that it comes off as liberalism’s worst enemy.
If human civilization really is nearing its end, assaultive bores like this one aren’t helping. Tom Cruise, his face nearly unrecognizable beneath cookie-dough prosthetics, plays Texas oil tycoon Digger Rockwell who, as the movie opens, is desperately trying to keep his beloved but bedraggled long-haired emotional-support cat alive. We can see it isn’t a real cat; it’s sort of an animatronic thing, a bit of theatrical engineering, standing in for the real thing.
Even so, Digger’s pathetic attachment to this creature is supposed to be funny, or somewhat touching, or something—it’s hard to say what, but we do know that Cruise sure is doing a lot of acting around this limp assemblage of metal, plastic, and faux fur. The ancient thing, barely a plot device, will eventually die and is nearly forgotten. Meanwhile, Cruise’s Digger pads around his palatial digs in silk PJs and cowboy boots, alternately fulminating and rhapsodizing about nothing in particular, his overwritten eccentricities laid bare for indiscernable reasons.
His mansion home is classic old-money-meets-new: tapestries and boars’ heads adorn the walls, and giant picture windows look out upon dreamy gray vistas. Actually, nearly everything in Digger—shot by the enormously gifted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who should perhaps be tested for cataracts—is grayish, from the interiors to the cloud-strewn skies to the characters’ skin. The movie is only pretending to be fun; its antic joylessness will more likely wear you down.
In case you haven’t guessed, Digger is an environmental parable. Early in the picture, Digger receives advance warning of a cataclysmic world event, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. His ruthless quest for oil is the cause of this calamity, but even with his insider knowledge, he does nothing to stop it.
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