By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
• Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller
• R

So this is a little bit of a tough one, isn’t it?

Walking out of Digger, the latest from Alejandro González Iñárritu and the last film released by Warner Bros. before their merging with Paramount – which ironically feels rather apt for a movie like Digger – is like walking out of a fever dream. It’s difficult to describe, even more difficult to make sense of, and the only thing that you are sure of is that you likely won’t see anything quite like it ever again. For some, that will likely be a blessing, as Digger is prime made to polarize audiences, critics, filmmakers, and everyone in between for different reasons.

That of itself feels like the culmination for Iñárritu, who career has been a uniquely polarized one as of late due to his unconventional techniques and willingness to attack his audience. Bardo, his last feature, was one that felt like a direct assault on the sense while also a self-flagging critique of his own style, but Digger is that times a thousand, with Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast screaming at the top of their lungs, the sound design booming, and the wide scale of the VistaVision prints showcasing a much bigger scale then you would expect for a film like this. It’s almost entirely self-aggrandizing and spectacle and a flurry of a topical humor meant to get the audience to laugh as loudly as possible.

And that’s also the point. The contradiction of Digger, which reveals it’s hand around 30 minutes in after a smartly constructed turn that completely shifts the movie’s intentions and what it’s actually about, is that it’s all in service to one singular question – what is the point of this? In a world where we have already reached the threshold of no return and it sometimes feels like we are just ticking down the days until our inevitable collapse, what purpose does something like Digger, and by extension the artistic enterprise, actually serve beyond simply existing for the sake of existing? And does Iñárritu making Digger in the first place keep him complicit in that?

Digger has no easy answers, or even answers at all to these questions, and instead it’s 129 minute runtime is dedicated to letting the audience figure it out for themselves as to what to make of it. For those willing to get through it’s purposeful alienation, Digger is effective, purposeful, and even poignant in it’s depiction of a world post-apocalypse and it’s farce that led to it’s destruction. Tom Cruise’s performance has to rotate between high intensity and far more subdued nuance between it’s two desperate sections and it’s easily one of the best of his career. Even when caked in legions of makeup and prosthetics, there is a physicality to his performance that is just unmatched and the real treat is getting to see him hobble around and maintain a similar energy to his action work while in a more contained chamber piece like this. It’s certainly a reminder of Cruise’s abilities as a performer beyond simply just as the great “last movie star” of our time; he’s also a genuinely phenomenal actor and his talents are vast and varied.

The rest of the cast matches up to his level for the most part, with Goodman and Ahmed as the clear standouts of a large ensemble. Ahmed in particular has to play alongside Cruise for much of it and he manages to nail a more timid but eventually equally as slimey character whose culpability in the disaster is mostly due to his own fear of Digger Rockwell and his willingness to take part in his false narrative. The narrative of Digger Rockwell himself is even being manipulated the further the episode goes, and the film reckons with the idea of the story rather then the facts becoming the factual story in a way that leaves, once again, no easy answers.

Walking out of said fever dream, I really had no idea what to think of Digger initially. It was a film that managed to confound me in a way that I haven’t had in a while, leaving me with disconnected thoughts and opinions that I wasn’t sure to reconcile with each other. The long though I sit with Digger, and the more I let it begin to fester in my mind, the more I love it’s willingness to be a piece of art at war with itself. I disagree with the notion that the film is somehow an attack on “hopecore” movies or the idea of art being helpful because I don’t think Iñárritu actually believes that. If anything, the film is more critical of it’s own premise then you would think, with the main protagonist of the story less frustrated by the play’s existence and more at the insistence on playing everything as ironically as possible. Iñárritu likes art with hopeful messaging, it’s just that it’s not enough sometimes and there is a point where that’s not actually activism.

Lots of audiences will likely nope out on Digger and that’s understandable. I can’t imagine a film as genuinely unconventional as this and as antagonistic as this will ever actually work for everybody. But for certain audiences like myself, Digger is probably going to hit like a bullseye. And after a long time of thinking about it, I think Digger is by and far away one of the best movies of the year; a singular piece of art about it’s own existence and the rest of the artistic landscape that’s both a celebration and a condemnation, an attack and a defense, a call to action and a resigned sigh. There is quite nothing else like Digger. Dig on in.