Digging Deeper to Find the Meaning of "Digger"

When I watch a movie like Digger, I not only think about how daring cinema can be when it truly tries to get at the heart of an uncomfortable truth, but I also lament the lost potential of Tom Cruise’s career. I know, it sounds pretentious for a film critic (who isn’t even Rotten Tomatoes certified) to get on his high horse and feel bad for arguably one of the most successful actors of all time. But when I watch something like this, I am reminded that Tom Cruise is an artist who takes his craft seriously. I’m not saying there is no skill in making a Mission: Impossible movie—Cruise pulls off stunts that would make experienced stuntmen blush—but when he truly commits to a dramatic role, we get an actor putting his absolute all into the performance.

For an action movie, that dedication is admittedly harder to measure on a critical scale, whereas here the craft is so obvious you might only need to look at the poster to know you are getting something different. Yet a great performance—even one that anchors a film—is not enough unless there is a substantial movie around it (just ask Kevin Spacey, who acted his heart out with nothing to show for it in The Life of David Gale). Written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (who has two Best Director Oscars, in case you forgot), Digger is a black comedy about how money and the desire for power are leading to the Earth’s environmental destruction simply because the world loves its oil too much.

This is known to everyone, but nowhere near as much as it is known to Digger himself (Cruise), who loves to take an old shovel off his mantel and dance around with it while recounting how his grandpappy struck oil one day and started the Digger family fortune, thus proving (to himself at least) that the Digger family was blessed by God Himself. The problem is that was 60 years ago, and all this digging and exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources is creating massive problems for everyone else—to the point where settlements threaten to bankrupt the company. Digger doesn’t want to lose his empire, but he also seems aware that, unless someone stops him, he’s going to be responsible for the deaths of millions.

It’s rare when the billionaire CEO of an oil company has more sense than the politicians in power, including a U.S. President (John Goodman) who is more concerned with the fact that he has cancer in his ass and can’t simply nuke China because he would first be forced to read three massive books before gaining access to the launch codes. All the while, the narrative takes such strange twists and turns that the more chaotic things become, the more you question if any of this is actually reality. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Truthfully, I think a lot of us watch the news now and wonder if our eyes and ears can even be trusted; the way everything plays out is just so bizarre.

Is that the point? Considering Iñárritu’s previous film—Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths—played fast and loose with narrative, I’d place this as one step below that and one step above Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Meaning, it’s not something that can be easily followed, but give it enough time and distance, and the ultimate point will be understood. What is interesting about Digger is that while it has been compared to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for being politically irreverent, I don’t think the comparison works quite as well as it might initially seem.

Kubrick famously set out to direct Dr. Strangelove as a drama, before his understanding of nuclear war became so absurd he couldn't take the subject seriously anymore. Iñárritu, on the other hand, very much takes global warming and environmental destruction due to corporate greed seriously, so some of the commentary lands differently here. Instead of feeling like this could never happen, we almost laugh at how absurdly simple it SHOULD be to avoid the problems staring them right in the face! The bigger shocker is the pull-back-the-curtain moment when we realize Iñárritu is not finding humor in the situation so much as in the defeated nature of the aftermath—how we may just look back one day, throw our hands in the air, and laugh at how everything turned out in the end.

Laugh about what, exactly? Maybe that we elected such incompetent politicians. Maybe that the billionaires told us who they were and we let them walk all over us anyway. Maybe at the thought that someone like Digger had so much control over our lives and couldn’t seem to care less that he could have done more to turn the tide than the military. Or maybe we will just laugh because, at the end of the day, Mother Nature is a cold-hearted bitch, and we were too busy with our lives to take her seriously. In the end, Digger might hit too close to home for many to even understand the punchline. Its box-office failure likely means Tom Cruise will make more Mission: Impossible and Top Gun movies, and it probably means Iñárritu will spend some time in director’s jail. But if you’re going to be in director’s jail, you might as well be there because you had the audacity to direct this.