The Masterpiece That Almost Was

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger! is a wild, fantastical farce that almost becomes a masterpiece—but doesn’t. Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, the biggest movie star in the world, a man whose fame and ego have become so enormous that the distinction between celebrity and actual power has all but disappeared. When he gets swept up in an escalating international crisis, Digger does what any man accustomed to being the center of the universe would do: he assumes the universe has been waiting for him to fix it. Soon he is moving among presidents, power brokers, and assorted functionaries with the confidence of a man who cannot imagine a problem that might be larger than himself.

It almost works.

Prior to its collapse, Digger! is alive and unrelenting. Tom Cruise is a comic revelation, playing everything with such absolute conviction that the insanity around him only gets funnier. What makes all of this work is the movie’s relentless direction and sharp-tongued script. Like Dr. Strangelove, it understands that absurdity becomes funnier the more seriously everyone takes it. And like Duck Soup, it has little interest in behaving itself. Iñárritu keeps piling absurdity on top of absurdity, and somehow the faster the movie moves, the better it gets.

Iñárritu’s Digger! also has something distinctly Coen-esque in its collision between institutional grandeur and human stupidity, with supposedly important people making catastrophic decisions for petty, ridiculous, or incomprehensible reasons. John Goodman is the perfect comic buffoon as the president, a man ostensibly in command while seeming perpetually bewildered by whatever is happening in front of him.

For a while, the movie seems almost inexhaustible. But with roughly a third left, its comic engine starts to sputter as the film reveals itself to be, in effect, a play within a play. Jesse Plemons enters as Kenny, the producer at the center of this new layer of the story and, as we eventually learn, the real Digger Rockwell’s nephew.

The setup recalls Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, where a man tries to reconstruct his entire life through an ever-expanding theatrical production, building something like a Tower of Babel out of memory and performance. Iñárritu seems to be reaching for something similarly vast and unwieldy, but without the emotional architecture that gives Kaufman’s film its devastating weight, the whole construction buckles under its own ambition.

And what exactly is all this machinery in service of? Is this a movie about family? Legacy? Climate change? Late-stage capitalism? At various points, Digger! seems to be reaching toward all of them, sometimes in the same scene, but the ideas never quite lock together. The movie keeps accumulating themes without establishing the deeper connection that would make them feel like parts of a single argument rather than a series of increasingly weighty concerns.

The problem isn’t that the movie suddenly becomes serious. Dr. Strangelove, after all, is about nuclear annihilation. The problem is that it abandons the comic language through which it had been saying something rather effectively and replaces it with a more self-consciously profound one that somehow says considerably less.

That tonal whiplash is something Digger! never recovers from. The energy drains away, the comedy stops breathing, and what had seemed spontaneous begins to feel labored. That’s what makes it so frustrating. There’s a terrific, viciously funny movie here, and for two-thirds of its running time, you’re actually watching it in real time. The trouble is that Iñárritu seems to lose confidence in the power of his own absurdity and starts reaching for a kind of emotional and philosophical weight the movie hasn’t earned. By the end, you’re left wishing Digger! had trusted the lunatic movie it already was instead of abandoning it by the time the final credits roll.