Digger’s Unconventional Leap of Faith

A Review of Digger (2026)

There comes a time in every artist’s life when they feel they have to capture the problems of their art in their art. When they’re just starting out, they make movies or write books about life, things that happened, things that could happen. A guy wakes up, he falls in love or fights this person or goes on an adventure, and his life changes. The artist gets some success from that type of story and people recognize their work and suddenly the fourth wall is broken by the world’s recognition and their identity as “recognized artist” becomes the subject of their work. Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? 

Fellini may have invented the genre with 8 ½ (1963), a movie where a better looking version of himself floats through sets, mistresses, and dreams on a journey through the artistic process of its own creator. If Fellini invented it, it was refined by Truffaut in Day for Night (1973) and Fosse in All That Jazz (1979), the latter of which emphasized a particularly American brand of drug-abusing self-destruction which has become synonymous with the on-screen “troubled artist.” Later, Altman skewered his own Hollywood in The Player (1992) and Spielberg captured the real world effects of his filmmaking (like the sense of voyeurism and alienation he gets from his own life) in The Fabelmans (2022). With his camera held up to his life, the artist is sometimes kept at a distance from people. Or maybe they present a version of themselves to the world which is alien to their real self. How could an artist not engage with these themes in their own work? 

Sometimes this genre falls flat. When I watched Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City I found its overly meta-navel gazing about the meaning of being an artist to be too self-important and even dreadful (and I say this as a Wes Anderson enthusiast). Other times this genre is revolutionary. When I saw Megalopolis, where Adam Driver's architect stands in for Coppola as a troubled artist pushing the form forward, surrounded by corrupt bean counters as he manipulates time itself, I felt like the genre was taking its next great leap forward. When Coppola wrote the script for Megalopolis decades ago, his burgeoning project to remake American cinema, Zoetrope Studios, had just failed. “Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that’s available to us?" asks Adam Driver. Really Coppola is asking us if movies have to be the way they have been or if there’s new ways open to us.

Digger is one of these new ways; its director Iñárritu took Coppola’s charge to heart. It is a grating, full-throated, often grotesque movie about the excesses of man, his ego, his consumption, and his defiling of the earth. It’s strange then that I found myself so joyfully entertained, especially by Cruise. His performance of the larger-than-life anti-hero-meets-villain Digger Rockwell gives us a cocky, exuberant, playful Tom Cruise we haven’t seen since perhaps Collateral (2004).

I love Maverick and Mission: Impossible as much as the next guy but Maverick and Ethan Hunt are restrained, prudent boy scouts compared to the Dionysian trainwreck of Digger Rockwell. His appetite empties the oceans and his greed corrupts the nations. He is the American Berserk. He’s Billy Bob Thornton in Landman. Cowards will say he’s Big Business, Big Oil, or every Bush-era neoconservative rolled into one, but really he’s every American who ever existed. He’s the special kind of anti-hero/villain who reminds us of the million little hypocrisies and sins within all of us, and does so while making us laugh and shake our heads at the sheer audacity of his character. 

Now unfortunately we have to discuss a rather dull concept: is Digger a climate change movie? The short answer is no. Digger is a movie about how reality is constructed and about the inability of art to solve our greatest problems. It’s a satire of the kind of self-serious social commentary films that have come before it. When discussing the genre of artists wrestling with the self and their own artistic process, one has to mention Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008). It’s a movie in which a theater director, played poignantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, builds a play that increasingly mirrors his own life and mortality. For this reason, some have taken to calling Digger a Charlie Kaufman Don’t Look Up (that terrible climate change “comedy” which represents the kind of crudeness it means to attack). Or “Synecdoche, Al Gore,” as one Letterboxd user jokes. By this they mean that the director Iñárritu has brought a kind of postmodern, surreal, meta-fictional storytelling to bear on “climate changes movies.”

Some say Tom Cruise’s character is Iñárritu processing his relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio after The Revenant (a theater director yells at Tom Cruise’s character at one point saying that he’s very talented but a selfish ass to work with). Others say Iñárritu is parodying Adam McKay (for Don’t Look Up) and other exponents of that kind of Aaron Sorkin liberal social commentary.

But Iñárritu elevates this even further by (SPOILERS) revealing that the story of Digger is actually a play within the movie. He splits the narrative into two contiguous storylines: one the “real” world in which actors like Tom Cruise’s Curtis Markson prepare for their roles in a play and two the “fictional” world of the characters within the climate crisis. For some, this meta device, this story within a story, will be too off-putting and polarizing. Already headlines flood the trades about Digger’s box office flop projected to lose $245 million and the general bad taste left in the mouths of its viewers.

My response to this? Grow up. Digger is wacky and unconventional but it’s a far more tame movie, both formally and narratively, than some of its predecessors like Megalopolis. The way people talk about movies nowadays would make the Puritans regard them as priggish; movies can be more than A24 horror flicks and franchise action blockbusters. If this movie is too “far out” for you, I think you need to watch more movies. That said, the particular presentation of its story may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Many of the characters are vulgar and unlikable. There’s vomiting, dead cats, and frozen bodies. I’m not saying everyone has to like those things; I’m saying Digger gives us a much-needed expansion of our idea of what a story can be. And it's a genuine good time.

So go see it. You don’t have to agree with Iñárritu, enjoy Digger Rockwell as a person, or even seek out more stories in this strange meta genre we have inherited from Fellini. All you have to do is go to a theater, give yourself over to someone else’s vision for a couple hours, and feel something in an unconventional way. 

Disagree with my take? Let me know at mvs2132@columbia.edu

Originally published on Substack.