Digger
Rating: Four out of five stars
At the end of last week’s world premiere of Digger — which also served as the Royal Film Performance — many of us made for the exits in a state of such bewilderment that, on discovering we were not allowed to leave the cinema, it somehow seemed entirely plausible that this, too, was part of the experience.
Digger is so extravagantly strange that I was not the only person wondering whether we had stumbled into an audacious piece of performance art, with the audience unwittingly trapped inside the story at the Odeon Leicester Square.
The real reason, however, was considerably less theatrical. We simply had to remain in our seats until the Prince and Princess of Wales, together with their entourage, had safely departed.
Still, that reaction captures the film’s effect. Alejandro G Inarritu’s darkly comic satire sends the imagination spinning.
At its centre is a fabulously wealthy Texan oil tycoon, played by Tom Cruise, who is almost unrecognisable beneath prosthetics designed to turn Hollywood glamour upside down.
As Digger Rockwell, the ruthlessly acquisitive head of Rockwell Oil, 64-year-old Cruise is grey, jowly, balding and pot-bellied. At last, he looks his age.
I’ve already seen Digger twice…this is bold and often brilliant film-making: BRIAN VINER reviews Tom Cruise’s latest film (pictured Ross Hatt and Tom Cruise)
Digger feels like a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove, with environmental disaster supplanting nuclear warfare as the principal threat to humanity (pictured John Goodman)
When the film opens, Digger is facing two urgent crises. His beloved elderly cat, which sleeps beside him, has leukaemia. Meanwhile, his workers drilling in Greenland are in mortal danger after a methane leak.
Typically, Digger’s first concern is the animal. His vast baronial residence is crowded with trophies from his hunting expeditions, yet the dying cat appears to be the one creature he genuinely loves.
The Greenland emergency soon becomes impossible to ignore. After a devastating explosion, an enormous section of polar ice breaks away and begins moving towards Europe at what is described as an “alarming velocity”, threatening consequences on a potentially catastrophic scale.
The autocratic US president, played by John Goodman, and his cabinet descend on Digger’s mansion to address the crisis. The threat is laid out by Digger’s increasingly nervous head of environmental safety, portrayed by Riz Ahmed.
The satire is savage. Goodman’s President Compson is a foul-tempered, vulgar showman, while his cabinet meetings are filled with racism and sexism before ending, with breathtaking hypocrisy, in prayers led by a clergyman.
It is tempting to assume that Compson is based on a real-world leader: a politician keen to exploit Greenland’s natural resources and fond of the energy slogan “drill, baby, drill”. That apparent familiarity encourages us to believe we understand where the film is heading.
Then, roughly half an hour in, a major twist leaves us completely wrong-footed. I will not reveal it, especially since the surprise contains further twists of its own.
It is worth remembering that Inarritu is an exceptionally daring storyteller. His credits include Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), the films that earned him consecutive Academy Awards for Best Director.
With Digger, though, he pushes his ambitions even further. At the premiere, Cruise called it “next-level filmmaking”. I understand the description. The bigger question is whether every viewer will want to follow the film there.
Digger plays like a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic Dr Strangelove, replacing the threat of nuclear annihilation with environmental catastrophe as humanity’s defining danger.
The film’s main message, relayed via a bravura speech that Digger delivers to a grey assembly of European politicians, is that, as relentless consumers, we are all complicit in our own downfall.
I’ve already seen Digger twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, knowing the twists from the start.
First time round, I felt it got tangled in its own conceit and artifice, becoming not just baffling but self-indulgent.
Nonetheless, this is bold and often brilliant film-making, with deserved whispers of Oscar nominations for Inarritu, Cruise and Goodman, and fabulous supporting performances from Ahmed, Sandra Huller and Jesse Plemons, not to mention an animatronic cat.
Digger is in cinemas from Friday