By Michael Marano

Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Screening at Coolidge Corner Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston, and Kendall Square Cinema beginning on October 2.

Tom Cruise delivers a virtuoso turn, but Iñárritu buries a potentially potent climate-change comedy beneath exposition, self-congratulation, and stunts.

Tom Cruise in Digger. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire Digger attempts to create a weighty, intelligent discussion of our culture’s reliance on fossil fuels and the political, economic, and media manipulation associated with that reliance. But while the director has the intelligence to pull this off, he lacks the wit to pull it off.

Put another way, Digger is Jackass, full of pranks and stunts, when it should be Oscar Wilde, full of pointed quips.

The tragic thing is, the required quips are there in Digger. But Iñárritu doesn’t trust himself or the audience to allow them to work. Look at Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman. It was full of wit, from the casting of Michael Keaton as a washed-up superhero actor and Edward Norton as … well … Edward Norton, working on a John Osborne–ish stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver story. Birdman didn’t jump up and down, explain itself, and demand that you applaud it for being so clever.

Digger spends maybe its opening half hour throwing huge dumps of exposition at the audience. The premise is established, burning up the same amount of narrative time as an episode of Dragnet. Frankly, if one more element of the premise were added at that point, the whole thing would come down like a Jenga tower.

And it’s at that exact moment, when Iñárritu could have relied on wit, that he changes the premise of the movie. He pulls a stunt as obvious and, frankly, embarrassing as Johnny Knoxville breaking his dick on the handlebars of his motorcycle.

The moment in question is a “could-have-been-brilliant” comment on artificiality that becomes so artificial, that it degrades into meaninglessness.

The thing is, we need a movie very much like what Digger could have been.

The crazy plutocrats, technocrats, theocrats, and plain old dumbfuck assholes running and destroying our world are all present in Digger. They all deserve a good, solid, Dr. Strangelove–ish beatdown. But, as with last year’s treatment of Lex Luthor as a tech-bro tantrum-thrower in Superman, modern movies, no matter how absurd, have not found a way to compete with the absurdity of the real nitwits running the planet—in boardrooms and international seats of power. Digger has moments when it could give this gerontocracy a good kick in its withered, pale, wrinkly nutsack. But Iñárritu’s unmitigated self-congratulatory approach misdirects the blow.

And I’m still trying to parse lead actor Tom Cruise’s participation in Iñárritu’s miscalculations. I’m not one of those critics who bashes Cruise. I love a lot of his movies, and every time someone says he’s a one-note actor, I remind them of Magnolia and Born on the Fourth of July. His is an OSCAR BAIT! performance in an OSCAR BAIT! role.

But what I’m trying to figure out is this: Is it an over-the-top Oscar-bait performance? Or is it a parody of an over-the-top Oscar-bait performance?

Working under pounds of makeup to play a 65-year-old, despite being 64 himself, Cruise has to contend with Iñárritu’s fixation on—and commentary about—artificiality. Under the makeup, surrounded by sets and backdrops that look like paintings from the Hudson River School, Cruise’s work, whatever its merits, is inevitably dwarfed by the artifice surrounding it. Iñárritu’s fixation on the fake requires Cruise to radically shift gears, which I’m not sure he does enough to do. In a less overwhelming cinematic artifice, maybe variations in Cruise’s work would have come through better. Hard to say.

But there is no denying that Cruise delivers a showstopper of a one-take, extended monologue that parodies the 60-page speeches delivered by guys like John Galt and Howard Roark in Ayn Rand novels. This moment is a masterful work of acting, cinematography, and choreography, and its bravado and precision only throw the shortcomings of Digger into higher relief.

Iñárritu’s approach to Digger is a very deliberate and obvious take on Bertolt Brecht’s Alienation Effect, in which a film or stage play reminds the audience that what they are seeing is artifice, pulling them out of their emotional investment in the narrative so that they will engage with the story’s ideas and social commentary. Iñárritu used the Alienation Effect really well in the aforementioned Birdman. It was disciplined. It was smart. It was full of wit. It was a quip, a bon mot, not a stunt.

The problem is that Iñárritu’s use of artifice in Digger becomes dramatic to the point of derailment; it is so extreme that it pulls the audience away from the political critique. There’s real potency in a scene in which a bunch of fossil-fuel-loving corporate assholes and the highest echelons of the U.S. government, including the president and cabinet, respond to ecological disaster by debating whether their first response should be to unleash billions of AI bots onto social media to “control the narrative!” But all too often Iñárritu undermines his own satire, partly because he isn’t willing to leave well enough alone. His overwhelming need to “control the narrative”—not just the story he tells, but how the audience should react to it—is what, pardon the pun, buries Digger. Iñárritu’s need to control turns chaotic — he becomes a bull who thinks he is dominating a china shop.

Digger is nowhere near as brilliant as Iñárritu clearly believes it is. That self-indulgence undermines both the credibility and the force of the lampoon and commentary at the film’s core. Everything he wants to say is diluted by his misguided ambition to be postmodern and clever. It is as tiresome as listening to an MFA-program dropout, three hits of speed deep, rhapsodize about Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

At two hours and eight minutes, Digger feels considerably longer—especially when, near the end, Jesse Plemons is handed a lengthy monologue to explain what the movie is supposedly about.

It’s witless, and it is more awkward and cringey than looking at Johnny Knoxville breaking his dick. Watch the clip on YouTube.

Author, critic, personal trainer, and writing instructor Michael Marano’s favorite Tom Cruise movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol.