Direction: Alejandro González Iñarritu
Country: USA
An almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise, seemingly on steroids, plays Digger Rockwell, an eccentric, ostentatious oil tycoon whose cavalier company faces an ecological catastrophe of tremendous proportions in Greenland, where it conducts excessive drilling. The impact extends to Europe and the rest of the world. There’s some truth behind the plot’s outlandish nature, and these madmen look and sound familiar. Yet we eventually discover that all this is part of a stage play called Fossil Fools, and that Cruise is actually playing Curtis Harkson, an actor desperately searching for his daughter.
The mise-en-abyme strategy forces us to redefine our relationship with the characters, but that’s not enough to make us swallow this wacky portrait of an America in complete dereliction. The intentions may be laudable and justified, but the tone is so caricatured, forced, and aggressive that it’s easy to lose focus. What is meant to be satirical and darkly humorous soon becomes an indigestible, flawed mess: an unpolished, persistently uneven farce that unfolds at a frantic pace but never quite lands convincingly.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Babel (2006), Amores Perros (2000), and The Revenant (2015), turns this carnivalesque excess into an exhausting spectacle for the ears, eyes, and brain. Everything is too histrionic in its posture, too dense and pedestrian, with a deluge of images and dialogue that leaves some viewers behind. Even when approached as a casual comedy, Digger is not fun at all, but rather irritating and borderline intolerable.
