Media hacks fight fossil foolery and prefer Oscar bait.
Alejandro González Iñárritu always makes bad movies (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, Birdman, The Revenant, Bardo), so what is it about his latest film, Digger, that gets reviewers incensed? This climate-crisis satire has provoked animus among media hacks who usually support films promoting progressive attitudes; now they ignore his subject and attack his methods. Iñárritu’s collaboration on Digger with Tom Cruise, who achieved box-office success with the politically ambivalent Top Gun: Maverick, has met surprisingly vehement backlash.
The problem with their Big Statement conceit is simple: Iñárritu and Cruise teeter between mocking climate-crisis alarm and exaggerating the expectations of alarmists. Cruise’s oil-magnate hero-villain, a Texas blowhard named Digger Rockwell (named for the implement that made his grandfather’s fortune), not only sponsors the production of gas emissions (in more ways than one) but also presides over the end of the world as Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have predicted it.
Iñárritu’s patronizing plot gimmick has Digger’s unregulated generation of energy cause world destruction — an ice floe in Greenland cracks and heads toward Europe to cause a devastating tsunami. Digger’s overwhelming conservatism proves too powerful to curtail — especially when his arrogance climaxes in a speech before an international assembly where he calls out the world’s greed in rhetoric that is both unstoppable and undeniable. This super-obvious, you-know-who caricature leaves the media class dissatisfied as to where exactly Iñárritu and Cruise stand concerning today’s most divisive global figure.
The $125 million Digger is not a failure of nerve, but in political terms, it is a failed conceit. That’s typical of Iñárritu, who saddled previous films with confusing, unwieldy subtitles: Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance); Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. Mexico-born Iñárritu abandons the surrealist heritage of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel while striving for Anglo-American relevance, despite his inability to grasp cultural differences. Instead, the witless, inauthentic Digger aims for the sarcasm that Kubrick attained in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb while copying the queasy monochromatic style of Brazil, but without Terry Gilliam’s grim yet cartoonish flair.
The media class has trouble perceiving that Iñárritu missed the mark in his target practice. Most of them never experienced the harsh, brilliant satire of Roman Polanski’s The Palace. Digger’s ailing pet cat is weak tea after the shocking, bestial climax in The Palace.
Iñárritu’s faux-Americanism can be blamed for Cruise’s outlandish performance. Cruise’s Digger recalls the dread sincerity of his over-emoting in the awful Magnolia, but he’s become a better actor since then and sometimes shades this windbag with the comic spirit of his memorably vulgar movie executive Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Made-up and padded to show off overweight swagger, with a wispy Graydon Carter hairstyle, he’s spectacularly over-the-top. That big European Parliament speech poorly echoes Paddy Chayefsky’s warning in Network: “Why don’t we just stop drilling altogether? You don’t want me to! Deep down inside you want me to keep pounding! Oil is what we have! Oil is what God gave us! Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!” It synthesizes and satirizes Daniel Day-Lewis’s grandstanding in There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil).
Whatever Cruise’s excesses, he’s not as ridiculous as Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker (a combo of LBJ and Beelzebub) in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Cruise’s crafty theatricality is unappreciated by those petulant reviewers who criticize the film as overweening “egotism.” Cruise almost justifies Iñárritu’s inept meta-maximalism; he consistently enlarges the film’s framing device of a cautionary stage play titled Fossil Fools in which he plays a double role, breaking the fourth wall as an actor named Curtis Markson. Cruise instinctively knows better than Iñárritu how to convey the Millennial notion of life as a simulation taking place in a matrix.
While Iñárritu always chases after significance and Cruise seems genuinely ignorant of politics, the vitriol of the attacks is not sharp, balanced criticism. It’s just the typical pile-on by fickle reviewers who condemn Digger as a vanity project because they care more about defending climate-change and Oscar-bait hoaxes.
