I’m in a weird position for two reasons. The first is due to the limitations of my tools as a critic: It is imperative to the experience of watching Digger that I do not spoil one particularly huge plot point, even though it’s almost impossible to talk about the film on a thematic level without doing so. The second reason is that I truly believe this to be one of the most important satires of our time (and all time), sure to endure on account of how perfectly it dials our cultural number … but the message it sends is not one worth celebrating.
That message is a dark one: We are beyond saving. The American experiment is done. The world is burning. We have sold our values to the highest bidder, and we’re much too close to the edge to do more than dig our heels in and delay the inevitable. We are marching toward the apocalypse, and the proverbial ship has sailed. Satire is dead, and every last one of us sat and applauded as a handful of greedy pigfuckers gleefully destroyed everything we hold dear, just so that they could sail around on yachts in full comfort without a care in the crumbling world.
Did I mention that the leader of the free world is a child raping sack of rotting shit? Cuz he is. And we let him get there. He sailed to the top of the food chain on the “goodwill” purchased by his time in the entertainment world. We laughed and laughed as he told Meat Loaf he was fired from his imaginary business game show, and before long he became a powerful player on the world stage. And now he’s destroying the country because his brain is mush and the stupidest people on the planet think he’s an “alpha” (a concept that has been thoroughly debunked — but since when did facts matter?).
And it’s not like we haven’t made fun of the guy. There has been an unending parade satire making fun of him, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Robert “My voice is running out of batteries” Kennedy Jr., and any of a number of the shitheads and their enablers who care about nothing but the fact that they can wield power and money just for the fuck of it. Alec Baldwin won a goddamn Emmy for making fun of Trump, yet it did nothing to stop his meteoric rise to power. This is because satire only works when there’s an agreed upon reality for it to play against. Unfortunately, reality is no longer objective. My truth has destroyed the truth.
Digger is the first satire to outright announce its own ineffectiveness. It is the tombstone under which all cultural commentators are buried and rolling, myself included. The point it makes, in my limited estimation, is that the role of satire is to hold a mirror up to society so that it can see its faults from a fresh angle. But it follows up this point with a cruel truth: a large portion of society doesn’t know what a mirror is, and will choose to see whatever they want, regardless of what’s in front of their eyes.
There is hope, however, but the film calls upon the viewers to do more than just mock the powers that be. We must not sit idly by and hope that those with power wake up in the face of mockery. We must not assume that it will all work out just like before. We must respond to satire with action and refuse to let it serve as merely a salve, validating our very human need to feel “smarter than.” If the system is fucked, and it is, we must work within the system to destroy the system. We must also work outside of the system to destroy the system. We must accept that the system has already won.
But as previously mentioned, I cannot say why. The plot device which illustrates this utterly hopeless, utterly necessary thematic structure is simply too good to spoil (and I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to anyway). So yes, I must do that cutesy thing where I say “you’ll just have to go see for yourself.”
There are other reasons why you should go see Digger for yourself, chief among them the fact that everyone and their mother is constantly bitching about how “Hollywood never makes original films anymore,” and then when Hollywood does make an original film, these same folks stay home or, worse yet, choose to spend their money seeing Avengers: Endgame again because now it has 4 minutes of extra footage that they shot a week ago in order to retrofit their latest toys-in-a-sandbox tentpole to match an already overstuffed narrative that has long since begun collapsing on itself like so many multiverses colliding.
Another reason to see it is the roster of all-timer performances that keep this high energy circus moving. Tom Cruise, for the first time in ages, loses himself entirely in the role. There’s a bravura, 10 minute single take that ranks up there with his finest work. Riz Ahmed, as the scientist who none of the powerful men around him will stoop low enough to listen to, plays “hopelessly drunk” better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Sandra Hüller plays the one woman with even a modicum of power in this cartoonish world, yet no one wants to embrace her green plan unless it pays. It’s a role that taps into her natural ability to imbue comedy with pathos (see Toni Erdmann if you haven’t), and to play the absurd completely straight. Michael Stuhlbarg is there too, quietly and thanklessly being the best supporting actor on the planet.
The standout performance, however, goes to John Goodman. His President Compson is one of the most insane characters ever to grace the screen. If Digger is our generation’s Doctor Strangelove, it’s Goodman who takes the baton from the late, great Peter Sellers. His performance is wildly physical, extremely loud, and goes deeper in portraying the corruptive nature of power than pretty much anyone who has ever done it before. It’s extreme, but it has to be — the only way for satire to work even a little is by pushing past the absurdity of the real world, and right now the world is absolutely fucking absurd.
Alejandro Iñárritu takes a page from Roy Andersson, both in tone and cadence. Utter absurdity played deathly straight, albeit much louder and more ornate than in Andersson’s work. There’s also a touch of Bong Joon Ho in the sheer amount of detail that makes it into each frame. Iñárritu has always been a bit of a prankster, and most of his movies have a gimmick that many will dismiss as novelty (and in some cases, many are correct), but with Digger, the gimmick (which I cannot mention) feels less like experimentation or playful provocation, and more like an angry cinematic hammer that is pounding nails into the void, hoping to seal it up as it grows and grows, inhaling every nail with the appetite of, well, a billionaire rapist whose only skill is consuming everything we need to stay alive and solvent as a culture.
Make no mistake, Digger is a major work. It’s one of the most important films ever made. It’s raucously funny, relentlessly engaging, and utterly useless as a satire, and it knows it. That’s the whole point.
…and now that the Paramount/WB merger is locked in, Digger might be the last Hollywood film to even attempt saying something that doesn’t align with the values of a bunch of dudes who wouldn’t know art if it slapped their third mistress in the kitchen of their fifteenth home while she was feeding his favorite dog that he’s actually never met.
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth
Starring Thomas Chris Mapother IV, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sophie Wilde
Rated R, 129 minutes
