A common but fitting aphorism for the movies, if not life itself, would be Less Is More. No one needs a ream of information when a couple of pages will do.
As with all things in life, though, exceptions abound. And that’s never more true than with the films of the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. He’s one of a trio of Mexican-born filmmakers – the other two being Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Del Toro – who since 2015 have created films that have earned a total of 11 Academy Awards. Iñárritu himself has taken home four.
But just as Cuarón and Del Toro have identifiable styles – Del Toro especially with his penchant for strange creatures – it’s easy to recognize an Iñárritu film. For one thing, each at heart – despite the occasional stab at humor – strives to be a serious study of the human experience. For another, each one tends to be the exact opposite of Less Is More. In fact, you could say that in most cases Iñárritu believes that There’s No Such Thing As Enough.
Take his most recent film Digger, the trailers of which have been airing for months and feature how effectively the production’s makeup artists have transformed Tom Cruise. Instead of his normal vibrant, studly self, Cruise has been turned into an unkempt, out-of-shape and balding wretch of an elderly oil man. And to call Digger Rockwell, the character that Cruise plays, a wretch is no simple understatement.
Digger is the head of Rockwell United, a multi-national oil company founded by his grandfather. Intense, greedy and single-mindedly self-absorbed, Digger has ignored repeated warnings that the millions of barrels of oil his company has been pumping out of Greenland is causing the dangerous release of methane gas. And so it comes as no surprise to anyone except Digger when a catastrophic explosion sets loose an iceberg the size of the state of Maryland.
What’s worse, the iceberg is being carried by tides and winds toward Europe and is likely to cause massive flooding, loss of life and property damage well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Digger knows this, but he and the advisory board that he belongs to, which includes the American President Compson (played by John Goodman), decide to keep news of the iceberg a secret. And, accordingly, the iceberg does hit Europe, causing a cascading series of events that includes another iceberg breaking off from Russia and heading toward Alaska.
In the midst of all this, we learn – surprisingly – that everything we see is make-believe, rehearsal for a stage play titled “Fossil Fuels.” The play is a biographical look at the real-life Digger, and all the characters we have been introduced to are actors playing parts. That includes the actor, Curtis Markson (Cruise again), who is playing Digger.
It gets more convoluted from there. A subplot involving Markson has him disrupting the rehearsal, both worrying about the fate of his daughter who is on a flight threatened by a hurricane and complaining that the play itself is a too-fictional and not-serious-enough representation of Digger’s actual life. His rant is countered by a character (played by Jesse Plemons) who, it turns out, has a direct connection to the real Digger himself.
Iñárritu presents all this in a fever-dream manner, with reality blending almost seamlessly with the fictional stage rehearsal yet with moments produced in so outlandish a manner that they approach farce – especially those involving Digger, his head of environmental safety (played by Riz Ahmed) and president Compson.
In all this, it’s possible to see the influences of Stanley Kubrick (especially his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove), the imaginative production designs of Wes Anderson and even aspects of Iñárritu’s own 2014 film Birdman. Yet Digger, overstuffed as it is, never feels derivative.
It may not say anything new or even particularly smart about climate change, corporate greed or government corruption, all topics that are as meaningful today as they ever were – maybe even more so. But as with all his films, the way Iñárritu expresses himself makes Digger a riveting viewing experience to the very end.