Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.
But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse. Although it opened to a pitiful $20 million worldwide – against a rumoured budget of as much as $180 million – and will go down in history as one of the biggest commercial failures there has ever been, it is neither an out-and-out failure nor a much-misunderstood future classic. Instead, it is that rare Hollywood thing, a film of ideas, but the execution of those ideas leaves a very great deal to be desired.
Expectations were high for the film when it was first announced. Iñárritu has specialized at taking big movie stars – Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Brad Pitt et al – and subverting their images on screen, often to Oscar-winning effect. Anyone who marvelled at the epic sweep of The Revenant would have been excited at the prospect of the Mexican filmmaker directing Cruise in a thriller about the most powerful man in the world seeking to prevent the apocalypse. Except, as has become painfully clear over the past few months, the film is not a thriller, but an (intentionally) unfunny black comedy in which Cruise, caked in latex prosthetics and sporting a Texan accent, plays an oil tycoon known as Digger Rockwell, whose cavalier disregard for environmental concerns will, in his parlance, come to bite him in the ass when his company’s reckless drilling causes a natural catastrophe that threatens to kill millions.
This is, at least, how the film presents itself for its first, unbearable half hour, before it pulls the rug from under the audience and reveals its meta-twist. It is not, in fact, the unspeakably crass and annoying farrago that has been wasting its viewers’ time, but a staging of a satirical play, Fossil Fools, in a post-disaster New York, where Cruise is in fact playing an actor named Curtis Markson who has been cast as Digger. The whole affair has been bankrolled by Digger’s nephew Kenny, who wishes to stage the show – which began as a satirical revue in London – in order to castigate his uncle’s memory, and to allow an audience to engage in some bleak merriment at the expense of the idiots who caused the mess they are now in, before they have to return to their grim, drone and robot-riddled lives.
There is the germ for a very fine film here, with shades of Iñárritu’s Birdman, that asks pertinent questions about the role of art and satire. But unfortunately – unfathomably – the vast majority of the film returns to the increasingly hysterical and unbearable antics on stage, which play out in turgid and tiresome fashion. By the time that the ever-excellent Jesse Plemons appears as Kenny in the ‘real’ scenes, stealing the show with a memorable monologue in which he justifies his actions by suggesting that Fossil Fools will offer both him and the audience some much-needed catharsis, it is tempting to shout at the screen ‘Don’t you have any idea what story you want to tell?’
The answer, alas, is that Cruise and Iñárritu seem to have come up with the idea of making a film that will be as uncompromising and unlikeable as possible. And yet it also shows another side of its star (and producer) that has become increasingly clear over the past few years. He has failed to convert the world to Scientology, and so his pictures now deal with issues that set him up as an old-school preacher. The last two Mission: Impossible films, for instance, were clear attacks on AI, thanks to their villainous sentient computer programme known as ‘The Entity’ and Digger is an obvious lament for climate change, although at least, unlike the similarly themed Don’t Look Up, it doesn’t attempt to suggest that the world is about to be wiped out by an enormous, ham-fisted metaphorical comet.
Cruise has failed to convert the world to Scientology, and so his pictures now deal with issues that set him up as an old-school preacher
The film’s defenders suggest that it is a throwback to the Seventies and that decade’s often uncompromising, issue-led filmmaking, which is a fair argument. The obvious response, however, is that those films were good, and the bad ones have long since been forgotten. Digger will be remembered for being the last picture released by Warner Brothers, one of Hollywood’s oldest studios, before it is swallowed up by its merger with Paramount Pictures and rebranded as ‘Skydance’. It will undoubtedly end up being Cruise’s biggest flop and might even dent his crown as King of Hollywood, although Days of Thunder 2 is waiting in the wings to offer his fanbase a conventional share of thrills with the now pension-aged star.
I salute Digger for its originality, willingness to take risks and for the sparks within it that hint at what might have been. It has dug its own grave commercially, and, although many contrarians will continue to praise it, critically. I suspect that its long-term future, as far as it is regarded, will be that some mangy, flea-riddled animal, like Digger’s dying cat, comes to urinate on that grave, too. Unfair? Perhaps. But in a perverse way, it is what the filmmakers seem to have wanted. We get the flops we deserve, and Digger sums up our age with admirable perversity. So two cheers for Cruise and Iñárritu for that, at least.
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