Spoiler alert: Major plot details and the ending of “Digger,” now in theaters via Warner Bros., are discussed below.
“Digger” spends its opening stretch flirting with catastrophe — and not merely the climate-driven kind facing its characters. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s movie initially presents itself as a blaring, overplayed satire centered on Tom Cruise’s oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. Then it pulls back the curtain, revealing a far more intriguing film hiding inside the apparent wreckage.
That reversal does not transform “Digger” into essential viewing. It does, however, rescue the movie from the tedious obviousness of its first section and turn a potential endurance test into an unruly conversation about performance, money, environmental destruction and the limits of satire.
Boredom, at least, is never the problem. Cruise delivers a towering, deliberately broad performance, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki keeps the imagery in motion, and Iñárritu directs with relentless swagger. Even as the movie reportedly heads toward box-office-disaster territory, it remains too feverish and visually aggressive to be dismissed as lifeless.
The Digger Rockwell act
The trouble begins with the movie’s extended introduction to Digger, an ambitious oilman buried beneath grotesque prosthetics. Every detail is designed to advertise his vulgarity: He shares a can of sardines with his beloved cat, exposes his backside to his maid and sports a comb-over that barely stays in place.
Those touches rapidly become exhausting rather than revealing. Digger is surrounded by similarly exaggerated figures who bounce through his mansion as he discovers that his oil company may have unintentionally triggered a global climate disaster. The environmental provocation is delivered with so little restraint that the film’s promise of “a comedy of catastrophic proportions” starts sounding less like an invitation than a warning.
At this stage, “Digger” feels trapped by its own volume. Its characters are caricatures, its dialogue is clumsy, and its satire leaves almost nothing for the audience to uncover. The movie appears determined to make every point at maximum intensity.
Then the big reveal arrives: Digger Rockwell is not the reality of the film at all.
The twist changes the performance
Everything shown up to that point is part of the technical rehearsal for “Fossil Fools,” an ambitious play about Digger that is due to open before an audience within hours. The supposed inhabitants of Digger’s world are actors, and Cruise’s character is actually Curtis Markson, the production’s star.
Curtis drops Digger’s broad Southern accent and wrestles with his inability to find the right rhythm for the play’s satire. The shift is crucial. What looked like a movie failing to control its tone becomes, at least in part, a story about performers struggling with precisely that problem.
The reveal also gives Cruise more compelling material. During an argument with the play’s director, Hannah, played by Sophie Wilde, Curtis debates the relationship between satire and real-world events. With the fat suit, cowboy boots and Digger mannerisms temporarily stripped away, Cruise finds sharper emotional flashes than the opening caricature allows.
That scene carries additional weight after a highly controlled press tour for “Digger” yielded little that was personal or revealing from its star. Curtis’ frustration offers a more engaging view of performance and artifice than the movie’s initial grotesquerie. It also recalls the intensity Cruise brought to “Magnolia” and “Eyes Wide Shut.”
The theatrical framework strengthens several of Iñárritu’s bigger set pieces, including Digger’s appearance at the United Nations. There, the oilman tap-dances around an international community ready to punish him as he continues doubling down on his actions. Presented as staged spectacle, the sequence has more purpose than it did when the film seemed to be offering its exaggerations at face value.
Money, guilt and a damaged world
The play’s financial backstory deepens the film’s self-consciousness. Digger’s real-life nephew, Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons, acquired the rights to “Fossil Fools” and used his considerable wealth to bankroll it. He suggests that his reasons combine penance, self-punishment and a tribute to his family name, though he is also, fundamentally, a patron funding the arts.
That dynamic is difficult to separate from the drama surrounding Warner Bros., where new owner David Ellison has insisted that he bought the company for the right reasons. “Digger” itself appears to be the final film ever released under the Warner Bros. name, giving its questions about wealthy benefactors and artistic institutions an unintended extra charge.
The movie’s closing images are its most chilling. Audience members methodically put on gas masks and leave the ornate theater, emerging into the dystopian aftermath of Digger’s environmental disaster. Flooded streets, abandoned cars and military police surround them. The camera eventually turns skyward as the soundtrack fills with the natural sounds of wild animals.
Not every idea introduced by the twist receives equal care. Curtis’ attempt to locate his daughter’s missing flight during the technical rehearsal is notably underdeveloped. The movie’s added layer can also recall Charlie Kaufman’s more accomplished 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director who constructs a full-scale version of New York City inside a warehouse in his pursuit of truth. Both films use theatrical creation to reach for larger realities, but Kaufman’s approach is cleverer and more emotionally sincere.
“Digger” ultimately remains a deeply flawed movie rather than a secret triumph. Yet its audacious pivot gives Cruise completists, connoisseurs of notorious flops and viewers drawn to cinematic mayhem something substantial to debate. The twist cannot erase the punishing opening, but it ensures the film’s disaster is at least a fascinating one.