[COLUMN] In Digger, Tom Cruise Confronts the Limits of Art | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Digger, which is in theatres now. And just to emphasize that. I am not the biggest fan of Digger; I think it has some good ideas, but it buries them too deep in the narrative. However, if you are interested in seeing it, it is the rare movie that I would recommend seeing completely blind. It is a movie that really benefits from being processed in real time. So, if you are curious, please bookmark and come back. However, if you have seen it or if you’re not going to see it, read ahead.

It initially seems very clear what kind of movie Alejandro González Iñárritu is making with Digger.

The film opens with a focus on wealthy oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise). Rockwell has received word that one of his drills in Greenland has caused a fracture in a sheet of ice, that is leading to a massive leak of methane. Digger ignores all the warnings and presses ahead, hoping to get production up to speed. The crack grows into a fault, and the sheet of ice slides off Greenland into the Atlantic Ocean, causing an international crisis as it barrels towards Europe.

What follows is, in the words of the movie’s marketing, “a comedy of catastrophic proportions” as Digger conspires with a corrupt and inept American administration lead by President Compson (John Goodman) in an effort to at first attempt to mitigate the disaster and then, when that fails, to downplay it while covering their own asses. The film is broad and cartoonish. It is a farce, with actor Jesse Plemons describing it as “a kind of modern-day Dr. Strangelove thing.”

That is true, to a certain extent. In this opening stretch, it feels like Iñárritu is actually in conversation with more recent attempts at broad political satire, including films like Adam McKay’s Vice or Don’t Look Up. Those are films that depict contemporary concerns and political controversies in a very glib and knowing sort of way, inviting the audience to laugh at just how stupid things are, in the kind of climate that produces headlines like, “Donald Trump is too funny to be a fascist.”

However, around half an hour into the film, Digger drops the conceit. In a sequence of Digger and Compson talking in a room in Digger’s mansion, looking out over Digger’s vast estate, a tree falls over. Its roots, like so much in the world of Digger, have turned rotten. However, a hand emerges from the ground to catch and reset it. It is a prop. This is a set. What the audience thought was the movie was in fact a play within the world of the film, a beloved farce called Fossil Fools.

It turns out that Digger is actually being played by veteran actor Curtis Markson. The play is opening that evening and this is the last full technical and dress rehearsal. It turns out that Digger takes place in the near future, and that Fossil Fools is a play based on historical events within the world of the film, based around real people who were involved in a horrific climate change disaster, with the events rewritten as a broad farce.

It is an admittedly daring conceit from Iñárritu, one that immediately creates a layer between the audience and the film that they thought they were watching. There is a level of ironic detachment from the play-within-the-film. It is an interesting idea to think about, even if the film doesn’t necessarily do as much with the concept as one might hope. The audience gets to see most of Fossil Fools play out, and most of the framing drama around the production is fairly straightforward.

Still, it is clear that Markson is struggling with the material. Part of that is his own ambivalence around the staging of a broad comedy around a catastrophe that resulted in the death of millions, reducing complex human characters to living cartoons and archetypes from the decrypt president to the weaselly vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg). However, part of that has to do with the difficulty that he is having reaching his daughter, whose plane disappeared in one of the freak storms that seems to be just part of life in this bleak future.

Throughout the film, Markson clashes with Hannah (Sophie Wilde), the play’s young director. He is also somewhat confused by the strange man he notices loitering around backstage (Plemons), seemingly exerting a large amount of influence over the production. When this man hears about Markson’s missing daughter, he offers to help. He works for a large firm that is very good at finding people, and all he needs to track down the missing daughter is a phone number.

This builds to the second big reveal of the movie. This strange man is none other than Kenny Rockwell, the nephew of Digger Rockwell. He appears in the play, as a child (Teddy Hawley). It turns out that Kenny is actually funding the play. He caught a small, low-budget performance of Fossil Fools years earlier, bought the rights and decided to put on a lavish production of it. It is a very strange thing for Kenny to produce a show that presents his uncle as a monster who destroyed the world.

Addressing the cast and crew as tensions reach their peak, Kenny explains that this is his way of giving back. This is his way of supporting the arts. He is offering a gift to the world wounded by the greed of his uncle. He is providing catharsis, giving the audience a space where they can come together and acknowledge their trauma and their loss and their suffering. Kenny is basically staging his own version of the third act of Hamnet, his own “new theatre of grief.”

One of the more interesting aspects of the critical response to Digger is the sense that quite a few viewers are taking Kenny entirely at face value here. “The movie, and the characters in the movie, surmise that through art, we can find solace,” argues Germain Lussier at io9. “Art can help us cope with our issues. Art can help us through the dark times. Which is what Digger ends up being about. A boy trying to right the wrongs of his family’s shame by giving art to the world.”

This is certainly one reading of the film. It seems perhaps a very face-value reading of the film. It is a reading that seems very much at odds with the cynicism baked into the framing device of the play-within-the-movie. Iñárritu’s decision to pull back the play into the film asks the audience to question the play. It seems fair to assume that the film expects the viewer to apply the same level of scrutiny to Kenny himself. After all, there is something just a little off about Kenny.

To be fair, part of this might simply be typecasting. From Bugonia to Game Night to Civil War, Jesse Plemons is not the kind of actor that directors put in movies as shorthand for “here is a person who seems perfectly on the level.” Plemons is an actor whose performance always has a little bit of spin and ambiguity on it. And though Kenny doesn’t have a big role in Digger, there are few actors who can loiter quite as intensely as Plemons.

More than that though, the film implies that there is more to Kenny than meets the eye. He is constantly lurking and - despite his protestations - clearly eavesdropping. He is able to geolocate Markson’s daughter within a matter of hours based solely upon her phone number. While it is very sweet and very generous of him to expend all that effort to reunite a separated family, how he does it would seem to raise some very serious privacy concerns. Even outside of those privacy concerns, it is a very deft act of manipulation from Kenny. It’s a way to get on Markson’s good side.

There is an interesting recurring motif within Fossil Fools, regarding Digger’s relationship to his cat, Maggie. Maggie is dying, but Digger loves her. So he tends to her, feeding her tuna off his finger. It is very clear from the moment that she appears on screen that Maggie is not healthy. Maggie is seemingly in constant agony. But Digger insists on keeping her alive because he wants to believe that she loves him. Kenny might have inherited a similar attitude from his uncle.

More to the point, within Fossil Fools, Digger is constantly struggling to control the narrative. He recruits Doctor Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) to assist him in that endeavor. Flying on a private plane to a meeting at the European Parliament, Ganesh wonders what purpose Digger might have for his critical testimony. “You’re here to help me shape the story,” Digger claims. “They already know the story,” Ganesh protests. “They know the facts,” Digger corrects him. “The story has yet to be told.”

Ganesh delivers a stirring speech about Digger’s corruption and decadence; how much he knew about what was happening and the inevitability of a disaster like this one. Ganesh tears through Digger, stirring up emotions in the crowd. It turns out that this is exactly what Digger wants. Ganesh’s testimony serves as something of a release valve, allowing Digger to make his own arguments and frame his own narrative. Tellingly, while making his pitch to Ganesh on his private jet, Digger served his chief climate scientist some tuna.

There is perhaps a sense that Fossil Fuels is serving a similar purpose for Kenny. After all, the narrative pushed by Fossil Fools is probably quite useful to Kenny as the heir to the family fortune. Digger is presented as the larger-than-life villain of the piece. He is the sin-eater for the family. In contrast, Kenny’s own mother Emma (Sandra Hüller) is presented as a champion of green energy and renewable fuel who had her legs cut out from under her by her scheming brother. Given that the Rockwell family’s complicity in the disaster is well known, this framing is very beneficial to Kenny.

This gets at the third big twist of Digger, as the movie ends. The opening night is a massive success. The crowd cheers. Markson is reunited with his daughter thanks to the charity of a benign billionaire. As the lights come up, the theatre announces that the atmosphere outside is a “level four.” The crowd shuffles out into a smog-filled and flooded New York City, into the world destroyed by Digger Rockwell and his family. By Kenny Rockwell’s family too, but his name’s not on the marquee.

There is a real bitterness to Iñárritu’s Digger, an incredibly caustic energy as the credits play over this sequence. In its final moments, Digger has real bite to it. Despite how flattering it might be to artists to suggest that it might, art will never save us. As popular as it might be, “eat the rich” cinema is just a distraction. “Hopecore” is the opiate of the masses. Digger presents a future where people shuffle in the theatre, laugh at the men who destroyed the world, and then go back to their sunken lives.

To his credit, Iñárritu is not a director who hides his feelings. Promoting Birdman, the director offered his opinion on the dominant superhero genre. “It’s a false, misleading conception, the superhero,” he explained. “Then, the way they apply violence to it, it’s absolutely right wing. If you observe the mentality of most of those films, it’s really about people who are rich, who have power, who will do the good, who will kill the bad. Philosophically, I just don’t like them.”

Digger takes aim at other trends in contemporary Hollywood, from the self-importance of comedies about real tragedies like The Big Short to the facile feel-good cartoonishness of films exploring global catastrophe like Project Hail Mary. Most brazenly, Digger is the work of a filmmaker who has won multiple Academy Awards working with a lead actor who is basically “the President of Movies” making a film that is very frank about the limits of art’s capacity to fix the world and the danger in how it can be weaponized to serve as an anesthetic.

This weekend sees the release of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a delayed follow-up to The Social Network, looking at how Facebook radicalized America. It’s an incredibly earnest film, with a triumphant slow motion closing scene fading to a black-and-white still image with text overlaid. It is a film that is clearly intended to serve as a call to action. Testifying before congress, whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) begs the assembled leaders, and implicitly the audience at home, “I implore you to act.”

However, the truth is that, for all the righteousness of The Social Reckoning, there has been no reckoning. The climax of the movie is set against the attempted coup of January 6th, when a bunch of rioters stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. The film treats this as a moment of realization, a point at which the culture woke up to what was happening. In reality, nothing changed. No major players were held accountable for stoking the mob. Trump was re-elected in 2024. He immediately pardoned or commuted any sentences assigned to those responsible. 

There has been a bit of a debate recently about “the last movie”, the idea that Hollywood has reached a point where almost every movie takes on a level of totemic importance. This is unwarranted pessimism. Movies will always exist in some form, and so good movies will always exist in some form. Even in the context of the death of Warner Bros., swallowed into the new Skydance company, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three is still a few weeks away from release.

Still, just as One Battle After Another and Sinners sweeping the Oscars in the year before the demolition of Warner Bros. felt symbolic, the release of Digger as the last Warner Bros. film before the merger goes through also taps into something. The weekend that Digger released, news came out that studio chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the pair responsible for the record-breaking box office and Oscar streak of 2025, and for bringing artists back to the studio, had been fired.

It feels oddly fitting that Digger should come out just as David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, has succeeded in not only turning Paramount into his private playset, but purchasing Warner Bros. as well. To get a sense of how movies get made these days, the Ellisons are reportedly pushing through a new Rush Hour sequel to appease President Donal Trump. The arts increasingly feel like they are just the playthings for bored billionaires.

And sure, those bored billionaires might let us have a little broad satire or cheery feel-good movie about how hope will save the world here or there – as a treat – but nothing too serious. It has to be uplifting and funny. It is a nice little safety valve, a way to let off steam. The tuna tastes good. This is the most interesting idea in Digger, and the biggest problem is that the movie takes so long to get to it. Indeed, the problem with Digger is that the film demonstrates the facile nature of these sorts of satires too well, spending too long building up to its actual point.

Digger might not be the most compelling film to watch, but it is at least interesting to dig into.