Digger: when exaggeration is the answer to catastrophe

I’d been wanting to see Digger, the new film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise, for several weeks, and I finally got the chance. I went to Cine-Teatro Turim, in Benfica, Lisbon, a small cinema with a small screen, but where the film looked perfectly good. Interestingly, there was quite a lot of laughter and a few gasps from the audience. You could also sense some confusion, which was something I experienced myself throughout the screening.

I expected a much more obvious satire, with Tom Cruise completely over the top, playing a powerful, exaggerated oil oligarch convinced he can do whatever he wants without consequences. One of those men whose decisions end up putting humanity at risk. That is indeed the premise of the film, but the story takes a different direction from what I had imagined.

I liked it quite a lot, although some aspects disappointed me. The excessive acting sometimes made the experience less enjoyable than it could have been, but the narrative construction and what we gradually discover about the characters ended up surprising me. Iñárritu hides several layers within a story that initially seems much simpler.

And I think it’s important that films like this continue to exist. I have the feeling that cinema no longer has quite the same ability to define a generation or influence society as it once did, perhaps because of the amount of content we consume and how fragmented our attention has become. I think of Her, and how it explored the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, or The Social Network, with its portrayal of the people who created one of the companies that most influenced our digital lives. And there are films like Dead Poets Society, which had a personal impact on me and which I still remember today.

I don’t know whether Digger will be one of those films. But I’m glad there are still directors willing to take risks, even when the results divide audiences. Unfortunately, the box-office numbers don’t help: the film made just $8 million in the US and Canada during its opening weekend, finishing fifth despite an initially reported production budget of around $125 million. That’s a commercial failure for a Tom Cruise film, and it leaves me concerned about the future of ambitious, original productions like this.

Iñárritu himself acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that the film isn’t perfect, but said he prefers strong reactions to a lukewarm response. I understand what he means. During the screening, there were moments when I worried that the exaggeration was making everything too elaborate and chaotic. As the story progressed, I began to understand the intention behind those choices, even when I didn’t agree with all of them.

There are still things I’m trying to interpret. It’s one of those films I almost want to watch again, because I suspect I missed some of its layers the first time around.

Major spoilers for Digger from here on

There’s a reason for the exaggeration

One of the first surprises is discovering that what we’re watching isn’t exactly the reality of the film. The story of Digger Rockwell, the oil magnate played by Tom Cruise, is part of a stage production called Fossil Fools. The man we’re actually watching is Curtis Markson, an actor portraying Digger during a rehearsal.

The revelation comes relatively early. Iñárritu doesn’t save the surprise for the ending, which is a curious choice. From that point onwards, we follow not only the story being performed, but also the actors, their conflicts and their attempts to understand events from another time.

It’s impossible not to think of Birdman, one of my favourite Iñárritu films. There, too, theatre played a central role, mixing fiction and reality, with actors tormented by the characters they portrayed, their ambitions and the problems in their own lives. In Digger, we find some of those elements, although the purpose is different.

Gradually, we discover that the play is inspired by a catastrophe that actually happened in that fictional world around 25 years earlier. The decisions made by Digger and other powerful figures contributed to an environmental crisis that profoundly transformed the planet. The story we’re watching is a satirical version of those events.

And this is where the exaggeration that initially bothered me starts to make more sense.

I later read the Variety review, which compares Digger to an attempt at making a Dr. Strangelove about climate change, but argues that it lacks the humour and subtlety of Stanley Kubrick’s film. I understand that perspective. There are moments when the characters seem to be shouting more than acting, and that excess weighs on the experience. I think Birdman was much more successful in the way it drew us into the actors and their emotions.

But there’s a narrative intention behind all this, and it becomes particularly clear during a discussion between Curtis and Hannah, the theatre director played by Sophie Wilde. Curtis wants to understand Digger better, find some truth in the character and portray him accurately. Hannah wants to preserve the exaggeration of the play, which has been around for many years and serves a very specific purpose for its audience.

These are two different perspectives on the role of art. Curtis wants to understand the real man behind the caricature. Hannah is more concerned with the audience’s reaction and what the play gives them.

Then there’s a third character who helps explain all this: Kenny Rockwell, played by Jesse Plemons. Kenny is the real Digger’s nephew, appears as a child in the events represented by the play, and is also the man financing the production. It seems strange that someone from the family would be willing to spend so much money on a work that ridicules his own uncle, but Kenny has his reasons.

In the society they live in, deeply affected by the consequences of the catastrophe, the play offers a form of escape. People can laugh at those responsible for destroying the world, ridicule their priorities and experience a kind of symbolic revenge. They can’t change what happened, but they can watch the humiliation of those they consider guilty.

And Kenny is hardly someone removed from power. He’s a very wealthy man, connected to a security and surveillance company. The family continues to exercise influence, although in a different way, and can now also play a part in how the past is told. That contradiction adds another layer to the story.

The discussion between Curtis and Hannah also made me think about Iñárritu’s own directing choices. In Birdman, the camera is often very close to the actors, following their movements and emotions. In Digger, during the rehearsals, the approach is frequently more distant. I understand that this distance is part of the narrative construction and gives us clues about what we’re actually watching, but I feel that some scenes lose cinematic power as a result.

I particularly remember Digger’s speech before an international assembly, where he defends oil as one of the great sources of freedom in modern society. The camera frequently looks down at him from above, making the character appear smaller. It’s a choice that makes sense if the intention is to visually diminish a man so convinced of his own power.

But I imagined how the same scene would look if it had been filmed from below, giving him a more imposing presence. Perhaps it would have had more visual impact, although it would also have communicated a different message. It’s precisely this relationship between cinematographic choices and the story being told that I find interesting. I can understand Iñárritu’s intention without thinking that every choice works.

The same applies to the exaggerated performances. They’re deliberate and serve a purpose, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make certain scenes exhausting. Still, what initially appears to be a weakness of the film ends up revealing something about the show those characters are putting together.

The adults laugh. The children, not so much.

One of the moments I kept thinking about after leaving the cinema was the ending of the play. Digger ends up taking his own life by jumping from an oil platform, and the audience responds with enormous enthusiasm. The adults laugh hysterically, insult him and almost cry with laughter. There’s a sense of collective satisfaction in seeing that man finally defeated.

But I noticed that the children in the audience didn’t seem to react in the same way. Some looked uncomfortable, while others didn’t seem to understand what was so funny. I kept wondering why Iñárritu had chosen to show that difference.

The first interpretation is relatively simple. The children are watching a man kill himself. They don’t necessarily have the same historical context or the same anger towards the character. The adults, on the other hand, have lived more directly with the consequences of the catastrophe and see his death as a form of revenge, almost a form of justice.

But I think there may be something else. For those children, the dystopian reality they live in is the only world they’ve ever known. They don’t necessarily remember an earlier society, cities without those environmental changes or a different way of life. The play represents a story that shaped their lives, but they haven’t experienced it in the same way as the adults.

And then there’s a third interpretation that occurred to me. Those historical figures, however much destruction they caused, will eventually be forgotten or remembered differently. Society moves on, generations change, and the people responsible for terrible events become characters in an increasingly distant story. The hatred felt by one generation may not make as much sense to the next.

I don’t know whether Iñárritu had all this in mind, but I found the difference in reactions very revealing. For the adults, the play is an opportunity for emotional release. For the children, it may just be an exaggerated representation of events they know through stories they’ve been told.

That’s also why the discussion between Curtis and Hannah takes on another meaning. By turning a real person into a caricature, the play ends up influencing how that society remembers him. That representation may make sense to one generation while losing some of its meaning for the next.

When we leave the theatre

For me, the ending was what made me appreciate Iñárritu’s narrative construction the most.

After the play ends, there’s applause, laughter and mockery directed at Digger. They even pour a little fake oil over Curtis’s bald head when the actors return to the stage to take their bows. The humiliation continues even after the performance is over.

Shortly afterwards, an alarm sounds. A level-four warning is announced concerning the air conditions outside, and we realise that everyone has to put on a protective mask before leaving the theatre.

There’s something curious about how naturally people do this. They’ve just watched a comedy about a catastrophe, laughed at those responsible, applauded the death of the main character, and now they’re preparing to return to reality.

It’s when the camera finally starts moving outside the theatre that we truly understand what happened to the world. We find a profoundly transformed New York, with flooded streets, wrecked cars, makeshift platforms for people to move around, a militarised police presence and an atmosphere of enormous social tension.

Until then, we’d been given a few clues, but we’d never seen the full scale of that reality. The camera follows the spectators, still wearing their masks, and shows us a society that continues to live with the consequences of the catastrophe.

There’s also a message on a wall that caught my attention: “Compliance is Freedom.” Obedience is presented as freedom, which takes on another meaning when we remember Digger’s speech about oil.

In that scene, he argues that fossil fuels brought freedom to modern societies, making transport, mobility and many of the conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to over the decades possible. It’s a speech by a deeply selfish character who uses those arguments to justify his own interests, but there’s a question there worth considering: how willing are we really to give up the conveniences that oil has provided?

The contrast with the words on the wall is particularly ironic. The freedom associated with oil, mobility and consumption has given way to a society where survival seems to require new forms of control and obedience.

But there’s another moment at the end that I think is one of the film’s best, and it’s worth staying for.

During the closing credits, after the camera has shown us that devastated city, the music suddenly stops. Everything goes silent, and we hear the same warning sound that was played earlier in the theatre. Once again, it’s the level-four alert, the one that forced people to put on their masks before leaving.

I loved this moment. It’s as though Iñárritu, after showing us an audience watching a play about a catastrophe, is now addressing the audience that has just watched his film. For a few seconds, the boundary between the two experiences seems to disappear.

And that’s precisely when my own experience at Cine-Teatro Turim took on another meaning. I was in a small cinema in Benfica, Lisbon, where I’d heard people laughing, gasping and reacting with some confusion to the more exaggerated scenes. Just like the audience in the play, we’d finished watching a story about a ruined world and were about to leave the theatre.

The film creates a strange feeling, and it works remarkably well: for a moment, it almost seems as though we’re going to find that same dystopian world outside when we leave the cinema.

And perhaps there’s also a provocation here aimed at us, as spectators. We can leave a cinema convinced that we understand a problem better, or even with the feeling that we’ve done something just by thinking about it. The audience of Fossil Fools also leaves the play satisfied, having laughed at those responsible for the catastrophe. But the world outside remains exactly the same.

After the applause, they put on their masks and return to the devastated city. And when we hear that final level-four warning in the cinema, for a few seconds it almost feels as though it’s our turn to leave.