On Screen: “Digger”

Digger

SPOILER ALERT … BUT NECESSARY … proceed with caution:

Tom Cruise relishes risk-taking — hanging from airplanes, scaling skyscrapers, sprinting across rooftops and performing other death-defying stunts. Some risks pay off — others don’t. His strange, satirical black comedy “Digger” falls in the latter category — but it’s not his fault.

Filmmaker Alejandro G. Inarritu (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) creates a play within a film. Let me explain. Theater actor Curtis Markson (Tom Cruise) — almost unrecognizable under a ton of prosthetics — plays Digger Rockwell, a powerful Texas oil tycoon whose company causes a global environmental disaster.

Problem is: Viewers don’t realize that they’re watching the tech rehearsal of “Fossil Fools,” a prescient play — produced by Kenny (Jesse Plemons) — that’s about to open in London — until midway through “Digger.” It’s an audacious stunt, a self-indulgent, divisive gimmick that doesn’t pay off.

The curtain goes up on the proscenium stage as the story within a story begins with Digger nursing his elderly, dying cat. He’s interrupted with news that a methane gas leak triggered an explosion on one of his Greenland oil rigs causing an immense ice shelf — five times the size of Washington D.C. — to break free from the glacier. Now it’s on a nightmarish collision course toward Europe.

(This and most other scenes are deliberately filmed from below — indicating the audience’s point of view. And there’s a glimpse of John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night” (1977) on one wall. But Inarritu’s hints like these are far too subtle.)

Chaos reigns as Digger’s blamed by his furious eco-advocate half-sister Emma (Sandra Huller), conflicted scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), foul-mouthed U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) and his entire macho Cabinet.

With intense oratory splendor, belligerent Digger staunchly defends global capitalism, citing the world’s oil dependency as complicit: “Oil is the mother’s milk of human civilization!”

And the concluding revelatory twist — as the end credits roll — packs a wallop.

Utilizing an innovative, character-driven narrative, “Digger” evokes memories of “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and “Megalopolis” (2024), exploring the complexity of corporate power and societal collapse.

A movie, of course, is a sum of its parts. And at the top is Tom Cruise’s extraordinarily elusive, exhilarating. unpredictable performance, followed by Emmanuel Lubezki’s surreal cinematography, Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s ingeniously detailed diorama production design.