This one’s going to be difficult to discuss without giving away too much, given the nature of the film itself and the misleading marketing campaign that has led up to its release. For anyone who has heard that Digger is a musical and hoped that was true, I must disappoint you, but the amount of work that has gone into preventing the real shape of this film from being known before you enter the theater is roughly the same as what went into disguising that the recent film adaptation of Mean Girls was a musical. This bait-and-switch marketing technique obviously hasn’t resulted in the Digger landing for everyone, given that it is currently doing worse in the critical rankings than the latest Coleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, but I’m also going to have to talk around the things that really make it work in order for you to know if it’s going to be worth your time.
On at least some level, as the trailers have indicated, “Tom Cruise is Digger,” aka Digger Rockwell, the third generation of a family of oil tycoons. He lives in a house filled with corpses, surrounded by stuffed and mounted fauna, fowl, and fish; one shot finds him standing between two mirrors that are each framed by dozens of sets of deer antlers, so that there is only Digger Rockwell and death into infinity. The only living thing that he cares for is a dying cat named Maggie, whom he is continuing to try to keep alive despite her thirty-year life span clearly having led her to a place of misery. In an establishing character moment, he sends away the world’s leading veterinarian despite the man’s honesty because he would rather deal with someone whose fear of disappointing Digger is greater than their intelligence. Just before his half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) is set to announce the establishment of her subset company to the greater Rockwell oil empire, a clean energy initiative, a Rockwell Inc. drilling facility in Greenland explodes due to a buildup of methane, resulting in imminent disaster for most of Europe. This results in the gathering of Digger’s long-ignored climate safety scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the United States President (John Goodman), and his various attendant prayer warriors and warhawks to discuss what has to happen next, Dr. Strangelove style. But this is only one level of the narrative and must necessarily be the only one that I’ll address in this review, since it’s the only one indicated by the marketing.
Digger is as funny as it is knowing; it is a version of Don’t Look Up where the satire actually works, one that understands that it is useless to turn the monsters who have created the world that we live in now and in which our children will live shorter lives than we will into figures of ridicule and mockery, but also that there is value in doing so even if it can change nothing. The demonstrably evil people who currently pull the strings of government are cancer-riddled, destructive, morally incomprehensible ghouls, and we are largely impotent to stop them from killing us. Even when they are gone, when all the wealth that they’ve amassed still doesn’t stop them from dying because death is inevitable, when they are beyond the reach of justice, the only thing that we will have is our ability to laugh at them, to turn the thieves of our future into clowns for us to mock and belittle for their small mindedness, arrogance, and ignorance. It is a very small thing, and laughing at the dead ghouls who stole the future isn’t going to change our material conditions, but when it is all that we have, we must nonetheless laugh, because if we don’t then we have nothing.
It’s often said that it is impossible for Tom Cruise to completely disappear into a role. No matter how hard you try, you are never watching Ethan Hunt or Frank Mackey or Lestat de Lioncourt; you are watching Tom Cruise. Although that argument has lessened in recent years, especially after his all-out charm campaign around the time of Tropic Thunder, this is perhaps the role that is so unlike the man’s public image (and looks, thanks to prosthetics, sufficiently different from him) that he’s able to give a layered performance without reminding you that this is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Sandra Hüller is unfortunately given little to do, but it’s always good to see her. John Goodman gets a lot of mileage out of playing an incompetent president clinging to life and willing to destroy the whole world for no reason other than his vanity, but really, this is Cruise’s film. There was a lot of mockery online about the “his whole career has led to this” trailer that was produced for the film, but this is one of his all-time great performances, up there with Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky.
Digger is currently a new release, so I won’t reveal any more about it, other than to say that it quickly shot up to being one of my favorite films of the year, based on its comedy alone. It’s not one that requires you run out to experience it on the big screen, although there are definitely visuals that will reward you if you do; you can wait for streaming (and you might have to, if you don’t act soon). You’ll laugh however you see it, and the laughter will feel both impotent and uplifting.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
