Star power sells movies, but it doesn’t buy prestige. In the 10 years between Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise dominated the blockbuster landscape, but his Oscar nominations during that same period came from more grounded dramas (Born on the 4th of July, Jerry Maguire), and he closed out the last century with a third nomination in his wildest swing to date as the deranged motivational speaker in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Three decades later, he’s at it again. In his first role since seemingly wrapping up his Mission: Impossible tenure with last year’s installment, the 64-year-old actor is barely recognizable as Digger Rockwell, the kooky oil baron at the center of writer-director Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s strange and enthralling satire Digger.
Iñarritu, who scored two back-to-back Best Director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant, has constructed a unique set of challenges for Cruise that the movie’s lively trailer doesn’t quite spoil. Yes, this colorful and imaginative dystopian look at corporate greed embodies many of the apocalyptic fears of the moment. Buried under reams of unflattering prosthetics that reportedly took six hours of work per day, Cruise hides beneath wrinkly flesh and covers his polished frame with a fat suit, transforming into a cartoonish embodiment of unapologetic greed. But there’s a purpose to the artifice that goes beyond the story it tells on the surface.
On the one hand, the performance functions in much the same way that Peter Sellers transformed into Doctor Strangelove. Digger finds himself responsible for an ice sheet in Greenland cracking off the continent and heading on a disastrous collision with Europe. Digger’s kooky assertiveness doesn’t come across as particularly reliable, especially once it becomes clear that the country’s maniacal president (John Goodman) expects the baron to set things right for the planet. As if.
At the same time, Cruise has been tasked with playing two characters at once, and I’ll avoid spoiling much beyond that. Needless to say, Digger slowly reveals the full context of its narrative as the movie progresses, and even its seemingly large act 2 development doesn’t reveal the full scope of the imaginative world beyond the frame. Digger isn’t only about the potential for environmental waste and mindless greed to destroy the world; it’s a savvy look at how the world views its own dysfunctional extremes by folding them into the easy narratives of heroes and villains.
Cruise’s performance is a meditation on historical mythmaking, the way that large-scale atrocities can be simplified over time. In the movie’s final moments, the actor vanishes as Iñarritu turns his camera on the audience. It’s easy to laugh at powerful buffoons and forget the consequences of their actions until it’s too late. Cruise’s larger-than-life performance has been built to reinforce that harsh truth.
The character of Digger Rockwell is big and broad enough to put Cruise into the awards season conversation right on schedule. The Best Actor field is crowded with veteran contenders, ranging from John Malkovich as a dying CIA agent in Wild Horse Nine to Robert Pattinson in Primetime and Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary. Leave it to one of Hollywood’s most famous leading men to slam into this fall season with the year’s most gonzo turn.
Typically, the Academy rewards actors for dramatic transformations, such as last year’s twin roles from Michael B. Jordan in Sinners and Brendan Fraser’s hulking appearance in The Whale. Cruise fits snugly into that sweet spot, though he’s already won an honorary Oscar, and parodic performances don’t always yield the same level of respect. However, this particular turn is a thoughtful meditation on the failings of public leadership. The character’s monumental inability to fix the catastrophe he started suggests that it’s never a great idea to place the fate of humanity in the hands of one man.
In recent years, Oscar season has reflected a desire to award the movies with the most to say about the crises of modern times —the nuclear threats of Oppenheimer, the radical activism of One Battle After Another, and so on. Digger deserves recognition for critiquing that very tendency: It’s not just about an imminent planetary crisis, but whether or not said planet is paying attention to the stories it tells itself. See the movie and decide for yourself.
Digger is now playing at the Southampton Playhouse on our IMAX screen.