Poor Tom Cruise. I get it. You BADLY want that Oscar. So what do you do? The smart movie in your head is to partner with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Oscar whisperer. I mean, he got Leo his long awaited statue right? He just had to maul him with a bear. Problem is, when you dig for gold, you get dirty. And that’s Digger: a messy Oscar play Tommy C took a chance on that’s probably gonna pass him by again. Sorry boyo. Enjoy another honorary Oscar instead in a few years.
The movie opens in Digger Rockwell’s (Tom Cruise) opulent house. It’s DEFCON 1 today. His sister Emma (Sandra Huller) is worried about her environmental business going public. Digger’s climate scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns the oil tycoon his Greenland drilling site is about to jettison a giant glacier into the ocean and flood Europe. Oh, and most importantly, his old cat Maggie is once again near death and requires immediate medical aid. The Europe thing keeps interfering with Maggie, so Digger decides to go in front of President Compson (John Goodman) as well as European Parliament, and go on a publicity campaign to try to deflect the populous from blaming Digger for, you know, murdering millions of innocent people for corporate profit.
What Tom Cruise failed to see is that Digger was going to boil down the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu experience into 2 hours. Tom’s rose colored eyes got wide when he saw the acting vehicle presented to him. He really goes for it in a way I haven’t seen him do in a long time. The big sequence is at that European Parliament, surrounded by hundreds of extras, where he gets to be Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. It’s riveting stuff, playing to Cruise’s strengths going big and controlling a room with his magnetic presence. Inside of that there’s a layered story that let’s him go more insular as well, playing characters within characters so he gets to show off the range he rarely uses. Inarritu supports all of this by using that Birdman camera following him around the room, swirling and circling so we enjoy the acting display we’re supposed to admire.
Or maybe that’s because he’s trying to distract us from the rest of his production? Digger ends up like most of Inarritu’s movies: I had fun thinking about it in the moment, but like it less and less the more I think about it. Surrounding the Cruise Oscar vehicle is: what exactly? There’s a comedic nihilism pervading his tale, showing the layers of institutional safety the rich have surrounded themselves so they never have to deal with the consequences of their actions. The comedic pieces of Digger land at loud = funny most of the time, with everyone ratcheting up their performances to the max. John Goodman has fun going one note deranged, and Riz Ahmed finds some quirky nuances to his character, but otherwise, the movie ends up telling us rich white people f*ck everything up at the expense of everyone else. Um, da doi? Inarritu uses that razzle dazzle to further cynic us, and try to root for this dickbag because he can be charming. And with the story he chooses, also show us that the only thing the rich have to fear in all of this is the immediate blowback: time allows them to get away from anything. Those levels of deep cynicism undercut any message he’s trying to tell anywhere else, and leave you wondering, why you should care at all about anything, including this movie you paid $20 to see?
So, um, Tom, try again please? You are stellar in this movie, I just wish you got a chance to do it something more clever and sophisticated. How about a reuniting with PTA or Cameron Crowe? Vanilla Sky 2: Chocolate Sky? Sorry, I’ll see myself out.