Digger is getting a lot of bad press.
Bad critical reception press.
It makes you believe that you’re dealing with one of the worst movies made in a long, long time. Some over-artsy attempt at being cool and being taken seriously, so bad that it has strayed far away from the plot itself.
And I couldn’t disagree more. Not even if I forcefully willed myself to line up with the critical train that’s left the station with the movie’s release.
Because what I saw in a half-empty theatre told a very different tale. Quite the opposite, really. From where I was sitting, I witnessed one of the finest movies I have seen in a long, long time. I saw something that was written to perfection, executed with method and precision, with every moving piece of a film working at the pinnacle of cinematic perfection. There were no loose ends, there were no flaws, there was nothing that took my attention from the story I was being made to watch.
There’s one particular line in the movie that sums up what the film is really trying to do across its roughly two-hour runtime — making us laugh at something horrifying, a reality that we have already started to live in, something we know will soon be our everyday normal. And yet there is no other way out for us, the people of this planet, but to laugh at it. Because, like a certain super-villain said recently, this “…is inevitable.”
Digger works on multiple levels. Quite the analogy for the film’s title. A dark, satirical black comedy, it tells the story of eccentric oil magnate Digger Rockwell and the fallout of his greedy capitalist methods that almost bring the world to the edge of extinction.
And yet, we soon realise, laying this entirely at Digger’s feet is an over-simplification. He is a cog in the entire machine that is slowly steering the world towards mass extinction. And maybe more than just that.
Because Digger isn’t alone in this. And that is most brilliantly established in the European Parliament scene, where Digger takes the stage after the apocalyptic calamity brought on by their collective actions and labels the tragedy for what it is. Greed. Unbridled, uncontrollable, insatiable greed. In what was perhaps one of the finest scenes of modern cinema, Digger Rockwell lays it all bare, spells it all out for us, and turns an entire Parliament full of politicians baying for his blood into an applauding serenade to his larger-than-life aura. The speech was terrifying, and what happened thereafter — hilarious!
That is where Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s movie scores. It is primarily in the script, in the writing. That is where the movie is made to stand on its two legs — and thereafter, everybody involved in making it has just run with it. The production quality was top-notch throughout the movie’s runtime. The background score does the best job ever of elevating each and every scene, making the messaging all that much more in-your-face.
And then come the performances. Oh, the performances! Every actor, be their roles big or small, brings such panache, some pastiche, such aplomb to every scene they are a part of — it makes the movie all that much more spectacular. Riz Ahmed totally looked like someone they hadn’t given a script to — he just looked so lost with everything that was unfolding. That is the perfection in performance that often gets overlooked, that tends to get eclipsed by the bigger names and bigger performances. But kudos to Ahmed, for once again dishing out an absolute spectacle of a performance.
John Goodman was the perfect caricature of a President we all love to hate (and for good reason). And that was executed brilliantly, with all the idiosyncrasies, the madness, the ego on overdrive, every bit of the character he was out to parody. The machinery that stands behind this mad President, the characters who played characters outside of the narrative that was unfolding for us, the audience — everyone was chosen and delivered to the T.
And then the granddaddy of them all. The last living star of all time. The man, the myth, the legend — alright, so I have hyped him enough, but it is what it is. We eventually come to Tom Cruise, the man on whose considerable shoulders rest this amazing screenplay, this brilliant movie. And boy, does he run with it. I quite honestly do not believe that anyone else could have done the justice that he meted out across every frame he was in. He was not Tom Cruise in looks, mannerisms, or status anymore — he was the one and only Digger Rockwell. He commands his swagger, his tone of narration, his mad speech at the European Parliament (which I need to check again, but I am certain was all in one take), his disillusionment, and his separation of character. He breathes so much life into the character that he becomes the movie himself. He is Digger, and Digger is him. He tells you there is more to him than Maverick, than Ethan Hunt — and every now and then, when he’s not hanging out of a moving plane, or jumping off the top of an unnecessarily tall building, or literally flying a fighter plane upside down, he can do something so spectacular that you forget who Tom Cruise is. All you remember is the mad swagger of a greedy madman, of Digger Rockwell and his antics — and after all of that you still remember that he’s not Digger at all, but Curtis Markson, the man who’s only playing the role of the fictitious real-life Digger Rockwell in a play within the movie. Very, very meta. Very, very Tom Cruise.
So, yes, I don’t understand the bad press. I don’t see what they’re trying to drive at so spectacularly, rubbing their gleeful hands at the film’s box office reports, trying to rubbish this extraordinary adventure — maybe it’s just that Tom Cruise is too much of a popular star to allow them the leeway of believing this was at all possible, to allow some snooty noses to be rubbed in their own dirt — I really can’t explain it, because it’s absurd.
And Digger won’t be the first to face the wrath of mad critics. Countless films have met this fate. Many movies that were panned by critics on release and went on to be box-office duds are today cult classics. Digger will make it there eventually.
All I would suggest is don’t read about it. Not here, not anywhere else. No, go and watch it. Watch something spectacular. They don’t come along too often in life. And then draw your own conclusions.
Digger. A lot of laughs. The rest pure terror.