A new movie from the Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is always an event. So it’s disconcerting to discover that the event in question is the most disappointing film of the year: an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances. There are moments to enjoy in Tom Cruise’s boisterous leading turn, yes, but the film’s value resides chiefly in some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen, conjured by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner.
An ageing, paunchy Texan oil tycoon called “Digger” Rockwell is seen fretfully getting up in the morning, cooing over his horrible old incontinent cat, taking urgent messages from underlings about a certain situation developing in his drilling station in the frozen Arctic. He is played by Tom Cruise with a wispy baldingness and various other prostheses, together with a good-ol’-boy twang and a Stetson borrowed from Slim Pickens’s bomb-riding army major in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His prized possession is the battered old shovel his granddaddy used a century before, digging for black gold as a penniless young man in the lone star state. Digger likes to brandish this to make a point.
Digger’s – and the world’s – troubles come to a head when he is informed by his cringingly polite, querulous and terrified chief scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) that the company’s irresponsible drilling practices, of which Ganesh has been warning Digger for quite some time, have caused a crisis: a vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan island, has broken away from the Arctic landmass and is now moving quickly towards the coast of Norway. Its imminent landfall is going to be like a nuclear attack.
Aggressively unrepentant to the very end, Digger gets himself invited to the White House’s crisis meeting, chaired by the gaunt and unwell President Compson, crankily played by John Goodman, with various military top brass and besuited politicians, including the vice-president, a very bland role on which Michael Stuhlbarg is wasted. Digger effectively takes over as de facto C-in-C, lambasting the president’s pusillanimous reluctance to take responsibility for a situation that his political subsidies and permissions have created. Meanwhile, back at Digger’s residence, Sandra Hüller has next to nothing to do as his half-sister, a role whose substance may well have been abandoned in the edit.
But wait. The film’s shrill, scratchy characterisations are partly explained by a sudden, unexpected plot development, yet this only creates a second narrative strand in which the performances are … well … merely inhibited and uninteresting. Cruise’s set piece moment is his toweringly contemptuous speech to a stylised megaparliament of UN nincompoops, all of them shouting and pointing and dressed in grey, in which Digger defiantly lacerates their hypocrisy in affecting to despise oil, while remaining utterly addicted to it for all their consumer conveniences. (Tactfully, Digger does not attack movie stars’ private planes.) He also angrily says that moving over to renewables, including nuclear, is simply not viable. Really? Yet Digger’s claim remains unchallenged, part of what we are perhaps supposed to admire, in spite of ourselves, about his realist sense of everyone else’s bad faith.
It is only when the film’s big storytelling sideways lurch happens, that you can see how our investment in the action is undermined; it is enclosed within inverted commas, an unearned and somehow anticlimactic high concept, a situation which is not itself fully dramatised or investigated but presented as a fait accompli twist. As with Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, there may be a tacit consensus, understandable at some level, that at least we have a big mainstream movie which is talking about the biggest issue of our time, and we have a duty to suspend critical objection. Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump’s greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and everywhere else. Yet there is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?
• Digger is out on 2 October in Australia, the UK and US.
