02/10/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Digger appears to have polarised the critics. Several of the major players have delivered two-star reviews and grumbled that the film is ‘pretentious’ and ‘a holy mess.’ Only a few have been more positive in their appraisals. Perhaps that explains why I go along to this IMAX showing with such low expectations, but it fails to account for the fact that I enjoy the film as much as I do. For me, it’s wonderful to see Tom Cruise stepping away from the action-movie arena he’s been fixated on for so long, to work on something more unconventional. There’s been talk of an Oscar nomination, and I won’t be a bit surprised it that comes to pass; to my mind, he should have already won one back in 1999 for his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

Here he plays Digger Rockwell, an obscenely-rich oil magnate, living alone in a country house with his faithful cat, Maggie, a scrawny beast who appears to be knocking at death’s door. Digger is the owner of many oil-drilling platforms in the Arctic and he’s intent on plundering every last drop he can get before his licences come up for renewal. When he’s warned about the possibility of an impending environmental catastrophe, he glibly shrugs the matter off, even though his resident expert, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), has been warning him about this for years.

When the unthinkable actually happens, Digger is called in to help US President Compson (John Goodman) to deal with the developing situation. Compson is ill with (as he puts it himself) ‘ass cancer’ and isn’t really firing on all cylinders. (Remind you of anyone?) Digger falls back on his preferred method of doubling down and telling it like it is…

The film begins as a kind of Kubrickian black comedy, à la Dr Strangelove, with the various characters flailing about as the stakes rise ever higher – but something mysterious is going on behind the scenes, with bewildering cutaways to something that suggests that not everything is as straightforward as it appears. And who is the mysterious Kenny (Jesse Plemons), who keeps turning up and asking Digger such strange questions?

Directed and co-written by two-times Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Digger keeps quite a lot up its sleeve and it would be criminal to reveal any more about where this story is actually headed. Let me just say this: be prepared to have your brains well and truly scrambled. Cruise immerses himself in the character(s) he plays and he’s backed up by a stellar cast of actors including Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg in what amount to little more than cameo roles. The film’s main premise examines the ways in which so many heinous, hubristic characters are elevated to heroic levels long after their deaths: how villains are neatly regenerated as heroes.

Pretentious? Maybe it is, but I for one would rather see a film that swings for the fences (and maybe even misses a couple of them in the process) than happily pursues something we’ve seen a hundred times before. The small audience at the screening I attend would suggest that the naysayers are having their inevitable effect on Digger‘s takings at the box office, but I truly believe that this film attempts – and largely accomplishes – something really extraordinary.

Why not go along and judge for yourselves? And yes, I appreciate the irony of one critic telling you to ignore the warnings of others, but I have always valued originality and, to my mind, this film has it in… ahem… spades.

4 stars

Philip Caveney