Digger
Sitting through Inarritu's excruciating new film DIGGER is like being locked in a lecture hall with a smug, angry, ageist, America-hating professor who hits you over the head with their same opinion over and over again for 129 minutes, while a boombox in the corner plays the most excruciating accompanying music you can imagine.
But wait! It's supposed to be funny satire!
When you talk about film satire to me, I think about Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H*" or Paddy Chayefsky's "The Hospital" or Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove", the film this one has most often been compared to this week. That comparison I understand, because the visuals here, which are absolutely stunning, seem to echo Ken Adam's brilliant sets for Kubrick's 1964 dark comic masterpiece.
DIGGER is no masterpiece.
It's so full of itself, so condescending in attitude, so boring in long spurts and so reliant on a story conceit that happens a half hour in, that when the big surprise happens, it's a shoulder shrug that that simply totters off in another direction that only pays off in an effective end title sequence many interminable minutes later. I won't spoil that surprise 30 minutes in, but it wasn't the "OH WOW!" moment of cinematic brilliance that Inarritu clearly thinks he's pulled off. More like a "hmmmm...." moment that drags us down an alternate hallway just as bleak as the first one.
In the midst of this mess towers an amazing performance by Tom Cruise. I totally get why he was so pulled into the screenplay. It's a veritable stage play full of long, ten-minute dialogue scenes shot in one take, chances to explore a wild character and play a very different man than Ethan Hunt's sleek bravado.
And Cruise is fantastic.
Buried in a fat suit and old man makeup, Cruise IS Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon living by himself in a massive mansion that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. The house is packed with assistants and visitors though. And Digger's dying cat, who seems to be just as old as he is.
We watch Digger wander through one massive room after another, each one filled with the trinkets and trophies that Inarritu clearly thinks Americans are foolishly obsessed with, while WE SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT THE PLANET!
That's capitalized because there is no subtlety in this mess. Everything is SHOUTED! Every line of "important" or "funny" dialogue. Every "important point" is YELLED IN YOUR FACE. (We dumb Americans must be shouted at, you see)
This isn't satire, it's condescending, self-important and smug lecturing.
Imagine sitting through 2 hours plus of Greta Thunberg yelling full IMAX screen in your face about what a piece of shit you are. There. You've captured DIGGER.
When one of Digger's mining operations accidentally breaks off a huge ice shelf that then floats toward the UK, the world is thrown into crisis. Inarritu attempts to create the same kind of global and political satire of deniability that Kubrick did in his classic Strangelove war room scenes with Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, but it all just falls flat, spiraling into one flat, unfunny and repetitive scene after another.
John Goodman stars a President Compson in a performance that reminded me why the only Coen Brothers movie I hate is "Raising Arizona". Talk about ALL CAPS!
Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler) stands aside Tom Cruise and has some good moments as he portrays the one naturally acting human in the entire thing.
The superb Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) is completely wasted as Digger's sister Emma. She shouts, she's angry, she trips over Digger's shovel, along with half the cast. A great actress, completely wasted.
Jesse Plemmons is strangely hypnotic as.......oh forget it.
The only reason I sat through this mess (well let's be honest, I always sit through the entire film, because I don't think you can offer an opinion without seeing an entire work) is Tom Cruise. He's excellent, but even he seems to be growing weary by the final scenes on an oil rig.
Cruise is undeniable in the part, committing to playing Digger with the same intensity he jumps motorcycles off of cliffs or climbs the Burj Khalifa. He delivers the only chuckles in the film. There are NO laughs, but a few mild chuckles thanks to Cruise and Ahmed. Their scene on the private jet discussing sushi offers up the only solid comic flow of the entire film.
The music score by Cosmo Sheldrake isn't music. It sounds like sampling of an out of tune orchestra warming up and never finding its groove. It's pretentious, horrible to experience and annoying, which of course makes it perfect for the film decomposing all around it.
Beside Cruise, the only other positive about the film is the stunning production design that plays beautifully into the both the main story and the secret conceit of the film. Dennis Gassner (Blade Runner 2049, Road to Perdition) and Richard Johnson (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence) knocked my eyes out with one jaw dropping set and vista after another.
Prepare yourself for the global Intelligentsia to barrage the intellectual social classes with how brilliant Inarritu's latest work is on the true state of America, the world and climate change and the latest existential crises facing humankind.
Thankfully Inarritu is here to save us all with his latest work.
DIGGER isn't a swing for the fences. It's an absolute whiff, created in a self important bubble.
The only people that will be happy watching how hard this dreck bombs will be the creative team behind "The Bride" that came out earlier this year. They no longer have the biggest bomb of the year on their hands. DIGGER just pushed her off the altar.
DIGGER mines a D. Only Cruise, Gassner and Johnson's work saves it from the F that it so shallowly deserves.
Comments