PERFORMANCE ART

DIGGER review by David Guglielmo

While watching DIGGER, you might, like me, seesaw between loving and hating it — a surprisingly rare feeling these days, when modern movies more often act like they are on a first date with their audience, desperate for us to like them. DIGGER dares to be grating, at times insufferably self-satisfied, and it’s a scold to boot. Iñárritu has always directed with a sledgehammer. Someone must have told him the loudest director wins. With DIGGER, his “this goes to 11” style has finally found a genre suited to his heavy-handedness.

Spoilers ahead…

The reason for the cryptic marketing is that it was harboring a twist. No, it’s not a musical, but those who suspected it might be were onto its artifice. It’s a play. And in my theater, when that was cleverly revealed, I had to hike up my legs in my chair as people passed me in the aisle to leave.

I’m not sure if there has ever been a great Brechtian movie, and when the device comes as a surprise, the audience can feel especially duped. But in this case, what we lose in immediacy, we make up for in thematic layering and world-building that I, for one, found more interesting than watching two hours of the world established in the first act. And since the play is based on real events — events they are now living in the aftermath of — we still want to know what happens and how, while imagining what exactly the world looks like outside those theater doors.

It is also what moved me, and this time it wasn’t Iñárritu bludgeoning us to tears as he does in his melodramas. It came from a simple yet powerful message: even when everything goes to shit, human beings will still need art.

That’s not the only message, and I suspect that many of the negative reactions will come from the finger-waving monologue in which Cruise, the most powerful oil tycoon in the world, addresses a crowd that is literally a stand-in for the audience, telling them that, while he knew the dangers of exploiting our resources, we are just as culpable as he is so long as we live in a convenience culture we refuse to give up, where everything is “buy it now.” It’s only when we are truly ready to live sustainably that we should be able to throw stones. However true it may be, a more didactic speech has not been uttered in a movie in a long while. In an age where we vilify CEOs and the 1% as the cause of everything that’s wrong with the world, it’s a take-your-medicine moment.

Like DR. STRANGELOVE, which I’m sure it is already drawing comparisons to, it’s telling us all of this in the form of a live-action cartoon. Not in the form of slapstick physical comedy, but through over-the-top caricature. Cruise’s performance is just as big as Sellers’, and John Goodman’s performance makes Sellers — and Cruise — look like neorealism. So far, he’s my Oscar choice for Best Supporting Actor.

The spectacle of pulling back the curtain and seeing the extravagant props, backdrops, and special effects reveals Iñárritu and Chivo’s wizardry in the blocking, camerawork, and commitment to what Cruise called in an interview “handmade filmmaking.” Aside from images of CGI disasters on television screens, this is indeed a very tactile film. I was reminded of Fellini’s CASANOVA, another grotesque circus of excess, which he shot entirely within a studio, using plastic bags to portray the ocean. Iñárritu uses the same technique here, along with cotton for clouds, planes on sticks, etc. Not since Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA have we seen movable sets shift, appear, and disappear before our eyes in uninterrupted takes with such fluidity.

The color palette — all beiges, taupes, and dusty pinks — matches the sickly pale, overly made-up faces and washes out anything that could be thought of as glamorous. It’s shot in large-format VistaVision, often with wide-angle lenses, leaning into grandiose vulgarity with every frame. This is an obnoxiously bold work of art, worthy of all the superlatives and pejoratives it will likely garner in its reviews. It is many things, but the one thing it’s not is boring.

David Guglielmo is a casting director, filmmaker, and lifelong student of film. He writes about films because he loves them.