Down and Out: DIGGER

And here I thought the one bright spot of the end of the world would be respite from having to hear about the ghoulish billionaires and waxworks politicians causing it. What Digger supposes is we’d still be telling their story in the dark ages to come. It’s meant to be funny. Sometimes it is. It’s also a nightmare. Writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work has always played best as dark comedy, despite generally wearing the clothes of serious dramatic art. What is the grim survivalist revenge picture The Revenant if not a bleakly funny pile-on of insult and injury in stunning snowy western landscapes? Or how about the misrerabilist everything-is-connected globalism drama Babel? Its ice-cold framing of overheated dramatic twists has a bleary pile-up of tragedy that’s by turns moving and absurd. It stands to reason his Birdman, the most transparently comedic of his films, is his only Oscar Best Picture, what with its self-consciously showbiz showy one-take gimmick swirling around chewy monologues in the mouths of actors playing actors behind the scenes of a play. His latest is a bit of all of the above, mixed with a Yorgos Lanthimos straight-faced cynicism in the face of fish-eyed weirdness and a Wes Anderson conscious artifice and precisely ornate production design in a nesting doll narrative about narrative. 

It stars Tom Cruise, made more believably his mid-60s age with a dusting of makeup effects, as Digger, a tyrannical oil executive whose life is upended when he learns his drilling has broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Pittsburgh. Said iceberg is in a fast current on a collision course with the European coast. Disaster will ensue. The end of the world, even. The film quickly involves the United States’ government, as embodied by a tottering, quick-tempered, narcissistic president (John Goodman) and his staff of toadies and yes men, including a whimpering Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), snarling military men, and a pastor, all fervently praying with nationalistic fervor. The point is clear. There’s a toxic blend of corporate, religious, and political corruption gassing each other up and midwifing the apocalypse. It’s what Naomi Klein’s latest book calls End Times Fascism, and Iñárritu’s on the case. He’s never a subtle director, and here the stylistic pyrotechnics and thematic points alike are blasted out with a loud lack of subtlety. All the subtext is buried about half an inch deep at best until scene after scene dusts it off and presents it for our double-underlined awareness. And then (here I’ll be freely discussing what the film takes a half an hour to reveal, so reader beware) it’s revealed that we’re many years after the events in question, and we’re watching tech rehearsal for an improbably technically elaborate stage show revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s fools all the way down.

The movie’s a collection of good scenes that never quite cohere. The pale, filmic framing and layered artifice from Emmanuel Lubezki remains beguiling throughout. The actors storm and rage and flail in convincing satiric modes bolstered by thundering dialogue. (The supporting cast also includes Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons; it’s a whole movie of scene-stealers given the material to fill their time well.) But the cumulative effect is somehow both too complicated and too obvious to support the architecture around it. We’re placed at a remove both from the story in the story and the frame story. The play never really makes sense as a production, and it’s difficult to see why it appeals to the audience gathering to watch it. Nor do we have enough to understand the people putting on the play—they’re more stock type like Director and Producer and Actor. And being stuck in the theater with them gives us a cramped view of a wider world. It’s a hermetic, caustically angry, omnidirectional cynical movie. That it surges to life on the back of its committed cast and aesthetic curlicues makes it watchable and fascinating, even if never entirely successful. It’s perhaps best viewed as a star text for Cruise, who is, after all, playing his first new character in nearly a decade. He’s both an earnest actor fumbling through backstage family drama—a missing daughter, no less!—and a bloviating deep-fried billionaire trapped in his own mausoleum-like mansion where the only thing his wealth has earned him is isolation and futility. It'll take a dissertation to disentangle all those threads. It’s a movie where you might think appreciating the effortful artistry on display is almost enough to recommend sitting through it.