Digger May Be The Most Important Movie in Years... And You Likely Won't See it!
I was all alone in the first Imax showing of DIGGER.
Typically when that happens, poorly predicted box office opening numbers come true. But who could blame movie goers when Rotten Tomatoes pumps out a smelly 41% before opening night. Prevailing winds do not look good for Star Tom Cruise and Revenant/Birdman director Alejandro Inarritu.
Only 12 minutes into the movie, I checked my watch and made a mental note that 41% may be too high. Some reviewers must be feeling sorry for Cruise for spending his life giving everything to the movie industry. But point blank. It sucks. Cruise's Digger Rockwell is a cartoon character and his fake cat is a disgusting abomination.
I wonder if I am watching a Wes Anderson Astroid City clone (shudder at the thought). By the time John Goodman shows up as an even wackier over the top Looney Toon, I've about had enough. How the Hell could it be this bad?
And then something happens.
We LEAVE the looking glass. That's right, most people go through the Looking Glass, but in Digger we actually start there. When we return to reality, it's a surreal forced perspective change that my brain couldn't understand at first.
A tree falls over in a landscape that looks as if it were created by people who didn't know what nature should really look like. And then giant humans appear as the setting slowly begins to change and we discover that Digger and his world are merely a stage play and Cruise is an actor navigating this outlandish character and a personal crisis all while trying to comprehend the true meaning behind Digger and the play that he is about to perform live for the dirt time on stage.
As the story truly began to unfold in front of me, I braced for the certain messaging to come. Was this movie a lecture on how we are destroying the environment? Perhaps. And while I braced for the inevitable Hollywood lecture, I found myself falling deeper into the movie. Cruise's cartoon Digger became layered by the actor playing him... an actor without a southern accent, thank God. And the longer I watched, the more I became enthralled with Cruise's performance which I can now say is among his best.
Also a shout out to Riz Ahmed, who plays Ganesh in this movie and has a scene that blew me away. But the coup de grace of this movie belongs to Cruise. Who delivers a monologue so full of truth bombs, I immediately realize why the movie received both a low tomatoes score and a severely downgraded box office opening from $30 million to $12.
And I become emotionally deregulated.
Cruise's performance as Rockwell in the court of public opinion is a genius middle finger to those who ignore the destruction of our environment as well as those hypocrites who push a political agenda against oil and then fly home in their personal jets. It recognizes the people who are just trying to survive and calls out those who know the truth and attempt to hide it for personal or political gain.
In short. It's an F you to humanity. And you know what happens when you don't pick a side in the world today… you are swallowed up and forgotten. Or your movie makes no money and critics abandon you.
Well this critic, alone in his theater, stood up and cheered. Bravo. Because just when you think you have the movie figured out, it takes you a step deeper.
Jesse Plemmons, who is the perfect actor for every awkward character nails this role as well. Just as the play seems to be coming apart at the seems before it opens with Cruise stopping everything because the scene feels too outrageous while the play director played by Sophie Wilde insists it's an intentional parody. This is where we learn the events of the play are true and Europe really was decimated and a younger generation, angry at a world that has been taken from them is exacting their ounce of flash because it is all they have left. Plemmons who we find out is the nephew of Rockwell and responsible for the play explains that they are both right, but the only thing we can do is get on with it. Such a true reflection of life.
The movie ends outside of the playhouse where we see a world still suffering the effects of ecological disaster and humanity under a military security and words on wall that say Compliance is Freedom.
Emotionally deregulated indeed. I drove 30 minutes home in my thoughts, reflecting on what I had just seen. This is the most thought provoking film I have seen in a long time, And it's likely going to bomb in the box office. The thought actually frustrates me that so many humans are going to miss a movie everyone needs to watch.
Tom Cruise should get the Oscar for his mid movie monologue by itself. This incredibly honest look at Humanity, which stretches beyond the environment and I believe touches on the generational gap in relation to social media and the growing number of young people who will become left behind by an older generation unwilling or unable to make a sacrifice that could improve future generations.
What we learn is that the problem is not only multi generational, but a flaw of the human condition.
Digger will go down as a box office bomb because humanity isn't ready to acknowledge the fiscal, social, political and yes likely environmental disasters that are coming.
People on the left will clutch their pearls at being called hypocrites and people on the right will bristle at the cartoonish characterization, and there just aren't enough reasonable people in the middle to carry this movie. And it's a shame because it has something amazing to say.
I hope the financial and critical failure of this film doesn't deject Cruise and Inarritu from the successful job of making us all think without telling us what to think… something Hollywood does all too often. It would take the biggest movie star in the world, a likeable and mostly un-cancelable Tom Cruise, to make this movie. And from those of us who watched, thank you for making the sacrifice. MAy the world take notice in time.
