Movie Review: In ‘Digger,’ a ‘Dr. Strangelove’ for the climate change era

Just as the fate of the world hangs in the balance in “Digger,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s over-the-top, climate-disaster satire teeters on the brink.

It’s an audacious plate-spinning act, juggling exaggerated farce, sober anxieties and an oil-mad Tom Cruise. Iñárritu, an art-house showman, has always delighted in a grandiosity of vision: the long-take backstage circus of “Birdman,” the rugged vistas of “The Revenant,” the metaphysical musings of “Bardo.” You come to an Iñárritu movie for swagger, not subtlety.

And “Digger,” — a “Dr. Strangelove” for the climate change era — isn’t trying to mince words. Its desire to make a statement and shake up its audience may be unlikely to find broad critical favor. But there are times to go big. Can you dig it?

Some, surely, will not. The biggest ding against “Digger” is that, for a satire, it’s not particularly funny. Cruise is no Peter Sellers and Iñárritu is not Stanley Kubrick. Their strenuous efforts to reach a similar black-comedy pitch can fall flat.

But “Digger” is sharper on the other side of tragicomedy. An impassioned provocation aimed at both politicians and audience members, “Digger” is by any measure an uncommon major studio release — as urgent as “An Inconvenient Truth” but a whole lot more operatic. For better or worse, this is an of-the-moment big swing that’s unlikely to come along again anytime soon.

In the movie’s opening moments, Digger Rockwell (Cruise) wakes up in his lavish, wood-paneled home surrounded by antlers, taxidermy and polar bear rugs. With him in bed is his cherished cat, a barely-still-alive creature, portrayed as an animatronic puppet that looks more like Annette than a real feline. The suggestion is not only that Digger, an oil magnate, corrupts nature, but also that something more artificial is going on. The pastoral view outside his window looks more like a natural-history museum diorama than a landscape.

Meanwhile, Digger begins fielding calls from a massive oil drilling platform in Greenland. A glacier crack and methane leak from the seabed are worrying scientists, but Digger charismatically cajoles them with baseball metaphors. He asks instead for some “hustle” in increasing the daily barrels pumped.

Iñárritu’s tempo, working from a script by himself and four others, is typically hectic. Cruise launches into the character, a cowboy cartoon, with a torrent of good-ol’-boy dialogue. He proudly brandishes the shovel his granddaddy began the family oil business with. Nearby, a grandfather clock ominously ticks.

Emmanuel Lubezki, the brilliant cinematographer, films these scenes and others from below, giving “Digger,” a shot in VistaVision, a larger-than-life, carnivalesque quality. Things quickly go off the rails when an ice shelf nicknamed “Judy,” five times the size of Washington, D.C., breaks free of Greenland and begins steering toward Europe in what’s predicted to cause catastrophic destruction.

Soon, the not-so-dissimilar U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) and his cabinet are at Digger’s house, needing a plan. Compson pronounces it “a pickle.” The drill-baby-drill brain trust is exclusively male, white and decrepit.

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The ensuing drama is more about establishing a narrative rather than saving Europe. Digger vacillates between private scenes with Compson and a scientist named Ganesh (a wonderfully worried Riz Ahmed) whom Digger has, against the odds, taken a liking to. In a showstopper, Digger appears before a United Nations-like body, all of them outfitted in pistachio-colored clothes and irate at what he’s done to the planet.

It’s a farcical forum in which Digger mounts an emphatic defense of oil, “the mother’s milk of Earth,” he says. Not irrationally, he asks whether the world was really prepared to go without it. With a ringmaster’s flair, he makes a good argument. But the intrusion of reality, in the movie’s apocalyptic second half, has the final say.

There’s a second layer to this, though, running alongside. The movie as we experience it is, in fact, a play being staged, we learn early on. This meta dimension of “Digger” feels at first like a cop-out, a way of excusing the heightened extremes of the film. With a touch of defensiveness, Iñárritu has often tried to preempt criticism of his films with self-reflective digression. Remember how “Birdman” included a clash with a New York Times theater critic?

But the play-within-a-play structure of “Digger” opens the movie up to questions about the value of satire and limits of fiction. It also leads the movie to a darkly fateful place, far beyond fossil fuel debate. And it allows Cruise’s full-bodied performance to stretch from caricature to something more poignant. Cruise has always been best in portraying extremes of male ego (“Magnolia,” “Tropic Thunder, “Eyes Wide Shut”). His Digger will no doubt join those ranks. But, like the film, it’s the quieter, foreboding moments of his performance that stick with you.

“Digger,” a Warner Bros. release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “pervasive language.” Running time: 128 minutes. Three stars out of four.