Digger is not the film you think it is

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film starring Tom Cruise has earned barely $36million worldwide against a reported production budget of $160 to 180million, with marketing costs estimated at another $100million. It has been sold as Dr Strangelove for the climate-change generation: Cruise playing a grotesque oil billionaire responsible for an environmental catastrophe. Another expensive Hollywood lecture about capitalism, climate change and the terrible behaviour of rich people, delivered by even richer people, you may well think. Just what audiences have been crying out for…

But the film is called Digger, not Climate Catastrophe, for a reason. It is not really about the end of the world. It is about a man: the man who supposedly brought the apocalypse about. It is especially about what happens when real people are turned into fictional characters. And on those terms, the film is great.

Here is what the marketing of Digger deliberately and wrong-headedly withheld: much of Digger is a play within a film. Cruise plays an actor, Curtis Markson, portraying a historical villain, Digger, whose story is being reconstructed for an audience in the near future who are looking back at an environmental catastrophe. The grotesque performances, political caricatures, artificial sets and obviously animatronic cats in the movie trailer, which all paint such a misleading impression of what the film is, belong to that fictional theatrical production, the play in the film.

The play-in-a-film device is not a clever twist or a spoiler, as some critics have implied. It is the story. Yet the film’s marketing campaign has presented the play in the film as though it were the film itself, concealing the theatrical framing device that makes sense of its apparent absurdity. No wonder audiences expected a crude environmental satire.

The unfortunate outcome of this hugely misleading marketing ploy is that Digger has been a commercial disaster. But the problem is not simply that Hollywood spent too much money on a film. It is that it spent blockbuster money on an arthouse film, then tried to sell it as a blockbuster.

Artistically, Digger belongs alongside eccentric American films such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation: strange, self-reflexive films with major stars, international audiences and budgets that allowed them to be peculiar without requiring global blockbuster returns.

Digger has the imagination of one of those films but the production costs of a Hollywood tentpole movie. Its extravagance is part of its appeal, but the commercial expectations are absurd. There is an audience for this kind of cinema – but it isn’t large enough to justify the expenditure.

The expense is visible everywhere in the film. One sequence alone is worth the price of admission. Cruise’s Digger addresses an enormous international assembly, a thinly veiled European Parliament crossed with the Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter. Iñárritu captures perfectly the impotent self-righteousness of EU politics: the theatrical solemnity of parliamentary debate, the moral certainty of the politicians, their conviction that every speech is a contribution to civilisation and their remarkable ability to change positions without ever admitting to having been wrong.

The entire chamber seems devoted to the performance of political importance. Yet at one point, it becomes apparent that some of the people in the audience are actually dummies. Once spotted, they are everywhere. The sequence is gloriously artificial, extremely funny and magnificently choreographed. It exposes a political class that mistakes moral performance for political achievement. As a set piece, it is both compelling and hugely expensive.

The uneasy contradiction at the heart of the film is the environmental catastrophism that drives the story. The catastrophe is the premise, but not the point of the film. There is no reason to doubt that Iñárritu takes environmental destruction seriously and the catastrophe gives the story its urgency and its moral stakes. But it also serves as a MacGuffin, an empty plot device, allowing the film to examine how events become history and how historical figures become fictional characters.

Cruise’s character, Curtis Markson, begins to resist the play director’s interpretation of Digger Rockwell. Why must this man be portrayed as a grotesque villain? Why should the politicians surrounding him be reduced to ridiculous caricatures? The actor wants to understand his character. The director wants to make a point about him.

At this point, Cruise, in the guise of Markson, steps outside the play in the film and challenges the production itself. It is a wonderfully Brechtian interruption. The film asks us to examine how representations are constructed, rather than simply surprising us with the discovery that they are constructions. And who better to explore this than Tom Cruise?

The publicity around Digger presents Cruise’s performance as a radical departure from his familiar screen persona. But he is not really playing against his type. He is playing with his type. The intensity, earnestness, extraordinary self-belief and almost absurd commitment to everything he does have been integral to his public image for decades.

In Digger there are echoes of not only his Top Gun and Mission: Impossible performances (rubber masks on a private jet, anyone?) but also Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut. The game the film plays with us is that we think we know the real Tom Cruise, just as the fictional audience in the film thinks it knows the real Digger Rockwell. But in both cases, all we actually know is a character created through performance and public perception.

Ultimately, Digger is a Hollywood film about Hollywood. It’s about actors and directors arguing over artistic truth, about the vanity of people who believe their performances possess enormous political importance and about the peculiar business of turning history into entertainment. The film is not entirely flattering about any of them.

The political theatre, the play-in-a-film at its centre, is self-important, morally certain but may, in the end, be utterly ineffectual. The catastrophe has happened, yet the artists are still performing their indignation, still congratulating themselves on the significance of their work. What has any of it achieved?

The ending of the film complicates the question a little. As the fictional theatre audience leaves its performance, we too are preparing to leave ours. Perhaps the film wants us to do something more than watch. Perhaps it is exposing the absurdity of expecting artistic performance to accomplish what politics has failed to do. Either way, it is considerably more ambiguous than the environmental sermon its detractors are probably imagining.

None of this makes Digger flawless. The catastrophe sometimes sits awkwardly between the plausible and the absurd, and its extravagance occasionally threatens to overwhelm its ideas. But it is funny, visually magnificent, brilliantly performed and full of imaginative possibilities.

Hollywood has produced precisely the sort of eccentric, ambitious adult cinema that people keep complaining it no longer makes. It has then spent far too much money on it, sold it as something else and watched it collapse at the box office.

The sad irony of Digger is that a film about the dangers of reducing people and ideas to caricatures has itself been reduced to a caricature by its own publicity department. The marketing machine hid the film’s complexity and sold it as an over-the-top satire about an evil billionaire. In doing so, it committed precisely the artistic sin the film sets out to satirise

Maren Thom is co-host of the Performance Anxiety podcast.

Watch the trailer for Digger: