Tom Cruise has dangled from cliffs, skyscrapers and planes, but oil magnate Digger Rockwell is his riskiest role in eons. He opens “Digger” lounging in a bed soaked with cat pee, tempting an elderly feline named Maggie to lick wet chow from his gnarled pinkie nail. “Take a little taste for Daddy,” his grotesque billionaire coos.
The cat resembles Nosferatu. Cruise’s twangy Texan doesn’t look much better. Think a disinterred Ross Perot, hastily dusted off. After a decade of playing it safe with “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun” sequels, this is what it looks like when Hollywood’s last classic movie star finally sticks out his neck.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” is a bizarre stunt made on a big studio budget, a climate change satire that’s a self-conscious hybrid of Stanley Kubrick and Bertolt Brecht. It’s bleak slapstick about how audiences should react to the end of civilization. The back-to-back best director Oscar winner of “Birdman” and “The Revenant” has always loved a showy gimmick, but here puts his influences on bold display. Slim Pickens yee-hawed riding “Dr. Strangelove’s” atomic bomb to oblivion; Cruise brandishes his grandpappy’s original shovel that struck crude in 1917 and whoops, “Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!” You smirk at the audacity.
Cruise’s Digger is the man most responsible for making a mess of the globe — and no other actor but him could have gotten a movie this messy greenlit for a $125 million budget. Yet it’d be a mistake to judge “Digger” by the standards of a normal film. There are no emotions in it, only our own cold and cruel fears reflected back at us, as with a shot of Cruise standing defiantly in front of a mirror rimmed by antlers. It’s about inertia and abdication, not solutions, and while I don’t entirely love this strange comedy, I’m giddy that it’s lurched into existence.
The script by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman and “Birdman” writers Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone is a trio of nesting narratives. First, we’re with Digger on the morning he learns that an ice shelf has broken off his Greenland drilling site. Soon, the glacier will smash into Norway, causing what one protester calls a “gen-oil-cide.” When a scientist, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), insists that even Digger can’t change the ocean currents, the tycoon invites the president (a formidable John Goodman) and his macho cabinet to his mansion for an emergency summit. In lieu of warning Europe to evacuate, they pray and make a plan to cover their asses.
Scarier still, Goodman’s narcissistic POTUS seems to think the planet should die when he does. To emphasize the ghoulishness, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the president and his advisers in unflattering low angles with a formaldehyde sheen. Their graying jowls appear to be melting alongside the polar ice caps.
As soon as we’ve adjusted to the absurdism, Iñárritu gives the movie a seismic jolt. Digger’s very bad day — and, by extension, humankind’s — is actually a stage play within the film called “Fossil Fools.” Nothing we’ve seen is real: The trees outside the window are fake, the gas-guzzling private plane is a prop on a stick and Digger himself is a performer named Curtis who pesters the production’s young director, Hannah (Sophie Wilde), that he doesn’t understand the humor in his character’s sociopathy. Curtis barely has a personality. He isn’t particularly political and his creative turmoil barely registers. (Perhaps we should have seen him try different line deliveries?) Instead, Iñárritu shoves in a limp subplot about a missing daughter to humanize him.
What’s Digger’s motivation? We can believe that a handful of real-life people would destroy the planet to make more money than they could spend in a lifetime. They’re on TV whenever we turn on the news. But pay attention to a producer named Kenny (Jesse Plemons) and you’ll catch on that “Fossil Fools” is based on a tragedy that already happened outside the stage doors. What we’re watching is merely the aftershocks. Why we’re watching is the movie’s actual question. “Fossil Fools” isn’t a great play (the ending is especially weak), yet its fictional audience cackles at Curtis’ Digger as though laughter is the best revenge.
Is it? Not really. Iñárritu seems to think that catharsis is a salve, not a solution. Wherever you look in “Digger,” the world is collapsing: Ceilings spring leaks, coffeemakers explode. (The phenomenal production design is by Dennis Gassner.) Even poor Maggie the cat — the only living animal in Digger’s house and possibly one of the last living animals in the world — is decomposing in his arms, his sister (Sandra Hüller) says with a shudder.
Slyly, Iñárritu uses a robot to play pitiful Maggie, an artificial horror as uncanny as Cruise himself is in his prosthetic skin suit, pendulous belly and butt crack sagging out of his boxer shorts, tottering around like he could fall apart at any minute. Every other beast in the film, from the rhino head mounted on his wall to the polar bear rug under his feet, has died for his amusement, much like how composer Cosmo Sheldrake’s fabulous score mutates actual bird song into the wheeze of a broken-down circus calliope.
Excess reigns. The sets have too many doors, the scenes have a delirious number of extras and the actors yell their lines over the distracting clatter of crackling fireplaces, beeping machines and ticking clocks. One confrontation between Digger and Ahmed’s conscience-panged Dr. Ganesh takes place over the noise of an angry crowd booing in a nearby conference hall as the European ambassadors haul these Yankees in one by one to explain what went wrong.
Digger enters that room like a gladiator braving the ring. Outnumbered by these ineffectual bureaucrats a hundred to one, he runs circles around them in a raucous tracking shot, teasing the mob to be grateful for their cheap flights to Mallorca rather than condemn him for sucking that fuel from the Earth. Cruise puts the full force of his charisma and kinetic puckishness into this scene, reminding us that he could have had Nicolas Cage’s wackadoo career any time he wanted. Saving the day has never totally suited him — he’s too sharp and ambitious. It’s a thrill to see him play the saboteur.
Brecht’s furiously unsentimental farces got him harangued — first by the Nazis, then by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. “Digger” should fare better, barely. Most modern comedies about the environmental catastrophe like “Don’t Look Up” and “Downsizing”struggle because the truth underneath them is just too awful. Even the best satires of the 21st century — “Idiocracy,” “Team America: World Police,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Eddington” — initially stumbled at the box office. The audience needs time to enjoy how right they are.
But the horrible hijinks in “Digger” are so close to reality that, exiting the film, I was less sure than ever that humanity will still be around. There’s no hope in “Digger,” only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits roll. Then again, the silliest thing our species could do is resign ourselves to disaster. This future is not our inevitable curtain call — yet.
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