Civilisations are often remembered not for their politics or their leaders, but for the figures they worshipped. Ancient Greece is as known for Achilles and Odysseus as for its achievements in democracy and philosophy. Medieval England is remembered less for the Plantagenets than for the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. The wild west has Davy Crockett, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Years from now, people may look back on the past 40 years not as the era of the post-cold war consensus, 9/11 or the great recession, but as the age of Tom Cruise.
Throughout his long and varied career, Cruise has accompanied generations of moviegoers. He was on screen throughout the explosion of neo-liberal consumerism in films such as Rain Man (1988) and Jerry Maguire (1996). He entertained viewers through the age of global terror, through the paranoid espionage of his early Mission: Impossible films, or the surveillance capitalism of Minority Report (2002).
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And as his off-screen life has often been manic, so too have his films exploded onscreen. His body has contorted, stretched and leaped across impossible boundaries to keep the public entertained while society grows hotter and threatens to burn.
His latest film, Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu of The Revenant (2015) and Birdman (2014), is a culmination of all these concerns. That doesn’t make it any good. But it does make Cruise’s presence the most interesting thing about a film that is otherwise much too full of itself.
Cruise plays the eponymous Digger Rockwell, a brash, boorish oil tycoon with a mad southern accent operating somewhere between Dallas and Wyoming. Set in the near future, Rockwell runs his oil empire with a mixture of charm and callousness. He makes sure to remember all his employees’ names and families while dismissing their grave concerns about the safety of his latest drilling operation in Greenland.
As things escalate and the safety of the world is at stake, a Dr Strangelove-meets-Dogville satire unfolds, in which idiotic US presidents and ineffectual do-gooders all fail to prevent the worst from happening. And the worst happens. A lot.
Accidental ironies
All the while, Cruise’s face seems to slowly melt onscreen, buried beneath layers of prosthetics and makeup. With every frame, Digger’s body seems to sag, his head pulsates and leaks, and his hairline appears to recede.
It’s a hell of a way to treat the formerly ageless Cruise’s body. And a stark contrast to the razor-sharp physique he showcased on the cover of GQ magazine just weeks prior to promote the film, as if to reassure us that his real-world canvas remains untouched by the decaying spectacle on screen.
Some critics will likely call Cruise’s performance a “brave” attempt to take on a less glamorous role than the more generic action heroes he has been playing recently. But herein lies the disappointing paradox of Digger. It is a film trying to convey an urgent message, but undercuts itself at every turn by refusing to either let us laugh, or treat its own premise with sincerity.
Digger wants us to recognise the artificiality of everything onscreen so that we can appreciate it, to know that what we are watching is a construction and adopt a knowing gaze in response. But this simply destroys the film’s ability to matter. As a climate satire, it’s about as sharp as a sponge.
As a meditation on Cruise’s stardom, it’s equally deceptive. We watch Cruise climb into a rubber body suit to make himself look old, allowing us to forget that, at 64, there is something almost vampirically unnatural about his supposedly “ageless” appearance off-screen.
As we learn more about the man Cruise is playing, the harsher edges that might invite comparisons with the real-life star become ways of differentiating him. Digger flies around in a private jet eating sushi as climate change threatens all around him, but there is no attempt to consider the irony of Cruise – a man known whimsically for sending gifts around the world in his private fleet – performing such scenes.
Digger has a good relationship with his daughter, whom he spends much of the film worrying about. It’s unlikely to real-life contrasts can be made there either. Oh, and there’s a twist I’m not going to tell you about. Sadly, it makes everything even worse.
There is something about Cruise that resists fixed meanings. Both his offscreen persona and onscreen mannerisms are alluring yet deceptive, familiar to us all yet equally unreal. A film confronting those anxieties should have had something to say about our increasingly post-truth world dominated by powerful ageing men who lie. It’s a shame that Digger doesn’t.
It is a film far more concerned with looking clever than being clever. Perhaps that, in itself, says something about the world in which we live. For this is the age of Cruise. All hail the king.
Alexander Sergeant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.