By Emma Batterman
Recent years have seen an influx of what might be dubbed an “eat the rich” subgenre of film. Filmmakers seemingly fed up with the increasing wealth disparity and the capitalist need for profit have bravely taken to their multimillion cameras to shed a blinding satirical light on the absurdity of the billionaire class. 2022 alone saw critically acclaimed films such as Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out, and The Menu tackle the rich’s incalculable need for placidity at the cost of preposterous extravagance while the audience laughs at their violent reckonings. But what’s changed since then? These films, while bitingly critical, are certainly popular. Yet, the rich are still getting richer, the poor are still getting poorer, and the oil moguls are still drilling into the glaciers of Greenland. Director Alejandro Iñárritu has had enough.
Digger has just landed in theaters with Tom Cruise as the unrecognizable Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon with an outlandish flair for the dramatics. The world is melting into chaos due to his company’s underhanded drilling practices, and he’s been bequeathed the privilege of saving the world. On the surface, Iñárritu seems to be sticking to the formula––the ridiculous, farcical billionaire ensnared in a trap of his own making while spectators guffaw at his deserved misery from the safety of their theater seats. But as Digger charges ahead at the behest of an inept (and unfortunately realistic) American cabinet, the director begins to peel back the layers of our culpable self-delusion.
Digger is not a comfortable film. From the lens sitting just below a wrinkled chin while spittle spews from an open mouth, to the whirring mechanical cat that rumbles in its death bed, Iñárritu expertly crafts a setting that repels any semblance of pleasure. Even outside the growing unease of your increasing self-awareness, the film is catered to invite disgust. While Digger and his meek environmental consultant Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) attempt to placate the increasingly delusional President Compson (John Goodman), the ceiling to the presidential bedroom has a hole ripped open to the stars. The ice caps are melting, the floods never-ending. The buckets placed on the floor to capture the water leaking from the roof sit uselessly as it overflows onto the expensive, rotting carpet. As well-composed sets begin to collapse around the actors, the fourth-wall slowly crumbles while a tangible decay bleeds into the audience.
Iñárritu has a knack for introspective character examinations and their relationship to something other-wordly. Whether its Javier Bardem staring at the moving faces of the dead in Biutiful (2010) or Michael Keaton learning how to fly in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), the Mexican filmmaker is no stranger to using magical realism to form a rousing motif. Digger harnesses this allegorical sorcery and didactically beats the audience over the head with it. Through rotating podiums and rotting walls, the stage of fools is brilliantly pulled apart piece by piece as Cruise delivers a strikingly smarmy diegetic indictment of our complacency. Iñárritu doesn’t just bend the landscape of Digger Rockwell’s reality, he reaches through the screen and throttles you in the very theater you’re sitting in, punishing you for cackling at the very jokes he’s serving you.
The film’s sneers at the uselessness of art in a profit-motivated world coupled with an utter contempt for its audience are a strange breath of fresh air in an over-saturated medium of retroactively empty satires. Sure, the Chevrons and the BPs of the world will lead to our demise, but without them, who will power your cell phones? We can laugh at Goodman’s bombastic performance as an incompetent president who thinks he’s Jesus reborn, but at the end of the day it’s us who put him there. The director will not save you. No work of art will. With outstanding set design, grandiose performances, and a strikingly prescient, ham-fisted message, Digger is certainly a film that will stand the test of time.