For those still bitter that renegade Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu’s divisive theatreland satire Birdman beat out Richard Linklater’s Boyhood for the best picture Oscar in 2015, his latest dramedy sounds like a threat rather than a promise. Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, the larger-than-life American oligarch who’s accidentally doomed the world with his reckless North Sea oil drilling. Add into the mix a dying cat, a dying president, an in-fighting cabinet and an overarching narrative gimmick that reformats the entire plot about 30 minutes in, and that’s Digger, more or less. In it Cruise makes his most blatant swing yet for that coveted best actor Oscar that has continually eluded him.
It’s unfortunate that Cruise doesn’t seem to understand that “most acting” is not the equivalent of “best acting” – supporting players John Goodman and Jesse Plemons effortlessly run circles around him, even with the former’s lines largely revolving around his “ass cancer” – but that’s never stopped the Academy before, so Cruise should make it onto the ballot. He affects a sort of Foghorn Leghorn demeanour in the role of Digger, the prosthetic jowls and paunch expected to do the heavy lifting. He clucks and caws and crows through a broad caricature of the American ruling class, and a less memorable secondary role as a distracted actor. Such bombast seems to be the point – Iñárritu (and his four co-writers) wish to have their cake and eat it, swiftly whipping the rug from under the audience’s feet to exclaim, “Surprise – we’re satirising the very concept of satire!”
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This is Iñárritu’s $125 million gambit about the grotesque pageantry of our contemporary hellscape, one in which the ruling class will carelessly crush the proletariat underfoot and then, once the dust has settled, make art about it and expectantly wait for their applause. Ad infinitum. It’s less about politics and more about the function of art in crisis, yet remains oddly toothless for a film so insistent it’s making some sort of pronouncement. Iñárritu foolishly gestures towards films that do a better job both as claustrophobic character study (a poster for John Cassavetes’ Opening Night hangs conspicuously on a wall) and satire of nuclear dread (a chaotic courtroom scene is his blatant take on Dr Strangelove) and ends up only illuminating his own film’s shortcomings in the process.
Dennis Gassner’s production design is perhaps Digger’s greatest asset, a maze of elaborate theatre sets that rotate and reveal, framed by deliberately dingy cinematography that adds a noxious, immutable haze to every scene that seems to underscore how empty all the characterisations are. At a time when Hollywood films have never been so uniformly badly lit, there’s clear intentionality to Emmanuel Lubezki’s work – the disquieting ugliness sits alongside the grandeur of the surroundings like a chemical spill over a once-pristine beach. Digger is more interesting visually than narratively, a film remarkably pleased with itself for achieving so little, the cinematic equivalent of a billionaire expecting gratitude for a tax-deductible charitable gift.