Tom Cruise has spent the better part of the last decade running, flying, jumping, climbing and generally reminding us that movie stars are supposed to do things. Digger is everything anti-Cruise-que image that we have come to know. He stands still, puts on a prosthetic belly, grows a thinning head of hair, and plays a billionaire oil tycoon who may have helped cause the end of the world.
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of left turn that makes Cruise interesting again. Directed by Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, Digger stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a powerful Texas oil magnate whose drilling operation in Greenland triggers an ecological catastrophe. When a gigantic ice mass breaks away and threatens Europe, Digger sets out to fix the disaster he helped create, while simultaneously trying to establish himself as the man capable of saving humanity. Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Sophie Wilde round out the ensemble.
The premise is almost aggressively ridiculous. The fascinating part is that Irritu isn’t interested in making it merely ridiculous. There is a very particular kind of arrogance to Digger. He has accumulated so much wealth and power that the consequences have become an inconvenience rather than a reality. When scientists warn him that his operations are causing catastrophic damage, his instinct isn’t remorse. It is problem-solving, preferably the kind that allows him to remain the person in charge. Cruise understands that absurdity beautifully. Digger is not a subtle man, and Cruise isn’t playing him subtly. The accent is broad, the physical transformation deliberately grotesque and the performance frequently borders on caricature. Yet there is method beneath the madness. Cruise makes Digger’s confidence almost childlike: he genuinely believes that every problem has a solution if you are powerful enough, rich enough or simply loud enough. It is a fascinating inversion of the Cruise persona. For years, his screen image has been built around competence. Ethan Hunt may be battered, exhausted and occasionally terrified, but he can still fly the plane. Digger is what happens when that same confidence is attached to a man who has helped create the disaster in the first place. He wants to be the hero of a story in which he is also the problem. That idea gives Digger its sharpest comic edge. Irritu, working with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicols Giacobone and Sabina Berman, builds the film as an increasingly surreal collision of climate satire, disaster movie and dark comedy.
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