Tom Cruise Is a Scream—and a Gas—in “Digger”

A circus of bombast ensues, some of it courtesy of the score, by the British composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Digger is lambasted by his half sister, Emma (Sandra Hüller), a superficially liberal-minded Shiv Roy type, with her own eco-friendly initiative. For presence and volume, though, Emma is soon eclipsed by the President of the United States (John Goodman), a bellowing buffoon in a Trump-red tie. He arrives at the Rockwell estate with a gormless Vice-President (Michael Stuhlbarg) and what appears to be an entire Cabinet of Pete Hegseths in tow, all of them praying for God’s mercy one minute and prescribing the “nuke-ular” option another. The lone voice of sanity is Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s head of environmental safety and security, who explains various disaster scenarios, in an elegant cascade of high-tech graphics. In a room full of fascists and fools, Ahmed’s projection of competence—and of the spluttering exasperation that is the lot of the competent—proves a genuine balm.

It falls to Ganesh to address the public, and to lay the blame for the crisis at Digger’s cowboy-booted feet. But the tycoon seeks to turn the tables, and he unleashes a tirade that is insufferable yet enthralling. Staring down an assembly of the outraged, Digger spells out the ruthless logic of global capitalism and claims the world’s fuel dependency as the ultimate vindication. “Oil is what we have. Oil is what God gave us,” he snarls. “You demand, and I supply.” The crowd does not respond favorably, and, in the chaos, someone flings a shoe at Digger—shades of George W. Bush in Iraq. But Cruise’s oratorical frenzy holds you; he hurls himself into the proceedings with unrelenting bellicosity and a bold indifference to the audience’s sympathies. Watching Cruise here, I was reminded of what a good screamer he can be. There was the motivational mansplainer he played in “Magnolia” (1999), not to mention his monstrous Hollywood mogul in “Tropic Thunder” (2008). I also thought of “A Few Good Men” (1992), this time imagining Cruise, not Jack Nicholson, as the belligerent dispenser of truths we can’t handle.

High-wire big-budget filmmaking has become harder to find and tougher to market, and the past several weeks of pre-release speculation have not been kind to “Digger.” Now that Iñárritu’s film is before us, the question arises: Is it a disaster flick or a straight-up disaster? I’d say it’s a comedy of errors, both deliberate and otherwise. He has admittedly set a high bar for himself, stranding us in a barking-mad netherzone between the apocalyptic-farce terrain of “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and the dystopian media satire of “Network” (1976). Other cinematic allusions are a bit more subtly flaunted: the ghostly pallor of the characters’ faces, and of Lubezki’s palette in general, bring to mind the surreally deadpan comedies of Roy Andersson, in which the living already look as if halfway to the grave. Even so, a bracing theatricality persists. Should you happen to notice the poster for John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” (1977) planted on a wall in one shot, you will have made Iñárritu very happy indeed.

On balance, he does seem rather upbeat. “Digger” may wag its finger about climate change, fossil-fuel dependency, and the bottomless corruption and stupidity of our incestuously entwined corporate and political classes. But, for Iñárritu, the wretched state of the world has always been more of a starting point, a baseline narrative assumption, than a determinant or register of mood. And his film, at once proudly unlikable and meticulously realized, is both a daring display of craft and a rude sign of life—which is to say, the opposite of depressing. Iñárritu has retained the visual grandeur of “Bardo,” his quasi-autobiographical folly from 2022, but shaken off the self-mythologizing torpor; gone, too, are the stultifyingly glum metaphysics of “The Revenant” (2015). For reasons that are both obvious and not, the movie of his to which this one harks back the most, conceptually and tonally, is the inside-Broadway comedy “Birdman” (2014). In that film, it’s the show that must go on; in “Digger,” it’s the world.