“Digger” is such a lumbering white elephant of a movie that it almost makes you sorry for everyone involved. Making movies is always tough, and it can be harder still when a big studio production tries to say something. This one has an original script, good actors and a hefty budget. It also has enough visual attractions and distractions to keep your eyes fixed on the screen, even when your mind wanders to imponderables like: Why did Tom Cruise make this? Why does he look like that? Did anyone involved have the guts to tell him that this was a bad idea? And what on earth was the director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, thinking?
It’s a big and frenetic thing, crammed with gargoyle faces and a great deal of frantic scurrying. The largest, loomingest face belongs to Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil tycoon, whose enterprises lead to a climate catastrophe that takes up much of the movie. To play the role, Cruise, as is his custom, has gone all in for the role and drastically transformed his appearance with facial prosthetics, thinning hair and belly-forward padding. For the most part, he seems to enjoy peering and scowling from underneath these uglifying contrivances. He looks — and on occasion moves — like himself, only grayer, jowlier and heavier.
In some moments, Digger evokes Orson Welles’s monstrous creation Charles Foster Kane, an association that does this movie no favors. Each character is obscenely wealthy and politically influential, and both have important totems that are meant to express an ineluctable truth about them. Kane, of course, has a sled (the mysterious “Rosebud”) that he played with as a child before everything changed for him, while Digger has the shovel that his grandfather was using when he discovered his first oil deposit. The shovel now hangs above a massive fireplace in Digger’s mansion, one of those lavish, sprawling estates that the wealthy build as monuments to themselves and which invariably become mausoleums.
The first chunk of the movie largely concerns Digger’s scrupulously art-directed world, a bespoke lair with wood paneling, taxidermied trophies and a large dressing mirror adorned with antlers. As Iñárritu tours the house like an excited docent, characters enter and exit like old-fashioned movie clowns. Sandra Hüller storms in briefly, huffing and puffing, as Digger’s sister, Emma. She splits too soon, but other appealing performers cycle through, including John Goodman as the blustering American president and Michael Stuhlbarg as the flailing vice president. It’s a measure of Digger’s muscle that both characters come to him, visiting his mansion after a disaster in one of his Arctic oil fields turns potentially apocalyptic.
The movie was written — if you’re reading this aloud, you may want to take a deep breath — by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman, from a story by Berman, Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth. It’s unclear who came up with the name Digger Rockwell, though presumably someone found it funny; per its production notes, the movie is a satire. Despite the popping eyeballs, swiveling heads, flapping jaws and a few scenes that Iñárritu has tried to direct in a cutesy Wes Anderson-esque key, the results are largely mirthless. That’s the case even when Digger fawns over his incontinent antique cat, Maggie, a puppetlike critter who’s so ostentatiously artificial that her appearance is initially confusing.
The reason for her animatronic-like physiognomy becomes clear when the movie shifts into a belabored, self-reflexive register that is exponentially less engaging. The aforementioned production notes given to critics include a politely worded request not to ostensibly spoil “Digger” by revealing some of the twists — which I assume means that they don’t want me to write that the oil man and his slippery gang are characters in an elaborate stage production. This information doesn’t add much, though it invites another unflattering comparison, in this case to Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” a rich, philosophically minded puzzle about a theater director who’s staging a production that closely replicates his life.
Intentionally or not, “Digger” routinely evokes other films, including Iñárritu’s “Birdman” (2014), which more successfully plays with the divide between reality and representation. All that said, there are some nice moments now and again in “Digger,” which features another eerily destabilizing performance from Jesse Plemons that makes you want to follow his character to wherever he’s going. The relative restraint and expressive specificity of Plemons’s performance — his character holds his gaze on other people a touch too long, and his smile seems backlit by madness — is a relief, given the rest of the cast’s cartoony turns. It’s a bummer to see actors like Goodman, Stuhlbarg and Riz Ahmed so badly handled.
As usual, Cruise works hard here, but while his performance as Digger is certainly animated, it’s also a collection of moments — speeches, actions, gestures, grimaces — that never cohere. If anything, all of Cruise’s strenuous energy helps weigh down an already ponderous movie, which isn’t entirely on him, even if he is one of the producers. He’s obviously set out to try something different after a string of action blockbusters, but he’s sunk by this movie’s half-baked ideas and badly served by a director as self-serious as he is. For all his smiling, Cruise no longer has the earnest charm he did earlier in his career, and over the years his persona has often seemed as leaden as petrified wood. If that rarely matters, it’s because he’s so good playing a role that this movie simply doesn’t understand: Tom Cruise, star extraordinaire.
Digger Rated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.
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