Tom Cruise is going to divide us this year, and that might be the most interesting thing about his Oscar prospects for “Digger.” Depending on which screening you walked out of, it’s either the bravest swing of his late career or a miscalculation dressed up as one. Critics are divided, and audiences will be too. Typically, that reaction is a problem, but with Cruise, it might be what his campaign needs.
For the first time in a long time, he is starring in something the industry has to argue about rather than simply admire. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” is not what people are expecting, and how audiences react (via box office and word-of-mouth) will be the ultimate test of his star power. Before the festivals began, I posed a question: How divisive (or bad) would “Digger” need to be for Tom Cruise to lose this season?
Venice, Telluride and Toronto have come and gone and now we approach the moment of truth. But there’s a more interesting question percolating — what will a Cruise Oscar campaign ask the Academy to recognize? The film also includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons.
The social embargo that lifted on Sept. 22 was mixed, with many praising Cruise’s performance but coming down hard on the film’s ultimate execution. For the better part of two decades, Cruise has not presented as just a working actor. He has become a brand equivalent to Steven Spielberg, a symbol of moviemaking itself.
His image is no longer attached to performances so much as to the theatrical experience, to physical risk, to movie-star mythology and to the idea that someone still wants to do it the old-fashioned way: make movies for a giant screen. He doesn’t need to explain himself because the moving pictures do the work — along with the smile, the running, the airplanes, the motorcycles and the impossible stunts. That’s what makes his Oscar journey unusual.
Cruise is one of the last major movie stars of the 1990s whose competitive Oscar story remains unfinished. The Academy has already honored his contemporaries — Will Smith for “King Richard,” Leonardo DiCaprio for “The Revenant,” Tom Hanks twice, Julia Roberts for “Erin Brockovich.” That was a generation built around stars whose names were the selling point, and Cruise’s roughly $1.88 billion (adjusted for inflation) domestic grosses put him squarely in that company. Even as his career has come to be defined by a global kind of theatrical power, he’s still just a boy standing in front of the voters asking them to choose him.
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