The flop of "Digger" and the collective panning of Tom Cruise. Bye bye, Warner

For several days, I have wished to discuss nothing but "Digger". During meals, on the telephone, in online chats, and even by joining debates among cinephiles on social media—despite being well beyond that phase. I would urge everyone to rush to the cinema, ignoring the scathing reviews, the jeers directed at Tom Cruise, the box-office figures, and those who mistake a monologue for a political rally. Of all the films I have seen this year—or even just the last five—I can barely remember the titles, including "Odyssey". Scenes from "Digger" keep popping into my head: the decanting of tuna sashimi, the European Parliament as a giant glass aviary, John Goodman as President of the United States wanting to drop the nuke on the Chinese, convinced that his own anus is in empathetic and eschatological communion with an oil well in Greenland. If none of this rings a bell, do yourself a favour: catch up on it this weekend. I must confess, I wasn’t particularly keen to watch it either.

Tom Cruise is one of the few actors whose work can still draw me to the cinema, yet the trailer that appeared on my Instagram feed failed to impress. It featured a scruffy elderly man stroking a bedraggled cat. The old man was Tom Cruise, buried under heavy makeup to appear elderly, since time has not yet accomplished the task. The cat was one of those white Spectre villain cats, but with mange. The director, Alejandro González Iñárritu—the man behind Birdman and The Revenant, in which DiCaprio is shown curled up inside the carcass of a gutted horse or bison—I cannot quite recall which. Warner’s tagline was even worse: “A comedy of catastrophic proportions”.

Catastrophic because there’s an environmental disaster at the heart of it all, triggering an apocalypse. A comedy because we’re supposed to laugh. And I found myself wondering: in what parallel universe would Iñárritu – who is Iñárritu – and Tom Cruise, looking like that, be expected to make us laugh, as if they were Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder? The box-office performance was disastrous: the film earned just eight million dollars in its first U.S. weekend, having cost an estimated one hundred and twenty-five, or perhaps one hundred and eighty, even two hundred million—numbers that remain unconfirmed. Headlines have declared in bold letters, ‘Tom Cruise’s worst debut in nineteen years’, splashed across every outlet.Digger took in a quarter of what Verity did – a dreadful thriller adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel I know nothing about, and I feel quite content to keep it that way. Digger is also the last film from Warner, which ceased to exist on Tuesday: Paramount has taken it over, and the two companies are now jointly known as ‘Skydance’ – a name that sounds like a budget airline, an energy drink or a rooftop bar in Dubai. As it happened, I attended a screening on Tuesday. While waiting to enter, ticket in hand, at a cinema within Rome’s ZTL zone, a mother and her teenage daughter approached the box office in haste. “Two for ‘NAZA’.” “Sold out.” Crisis, panic, swearing. “We’ll even stand if we have to!” said the mother. “Madam, that’s not allowed, I’m afraid.”

While I was imagining this screening of "NAZA" with people standing, crammed in, just like in the cinemas of yesteryear when American blockbusters arrived, my daughter suggested a solution: "Mum, have a look to see if they’re showing "The Bibi Files" at the Jolly!" Anything about the IDF, please. As long as it’s straight away. Like methadone. For "Digger", on the other hand, no queue. There were only a few of us. On the way out, nobody spoke. Outside, a storm like the end of the world. "Digger" wears you out like a rollercoaster, hypnotises you, even makes you laugh, but leaves you drained, melancholic – yet with the certainty that you’ve seen a great film: a furious, excessive thing, brimming with ideas. It strikes like Judy, the plot’s iceberg in Digger – a mass of ice six times the size of Boston or Philadelphia that breaks away from Greenland and heads straight for northern Europe. As soon as it ended, whilst the lights came back on, I thought that in ten or fifteen years’ time, it’ll be one of those films about which we’ll say: ‘Can you believe they panned it when it came out?’. And the panning, so far, has been exemplary.

Dozens of articles feature the same pun on ‘Digger’ (excavator) and Tom Cruise digging his own grave, sinking into a flop, spiralling down a tunnel, and so on. Then, in quick succession: ‘the worst film of Tom Cruise’s career’, ‘a catastrophe’, zero-star reviews that would not even be given to the most shoddy Christmas comedy. And yet, as is obvious, Tom Cruise is magnificent here. Even better than in Magnolia, where a less daft Academy would have given him the Oscar (which they won’t give him this time either – too bad for them). Yet Cruise remains out of step with the times: no tearful interview, no campaign to save the planet, no book about depression or being bullied as a child, no compulsory treatment order, no thank-you to his psychiatrist, no public breakdown. At sixty-four, he runs, falls, jumps out of aeroplanes, bounces around – like a Top Gun version of Wile E. Coyote. And the first time he shows himself to be old, limp and balding, he does so behind a mask of fake wrinkles to remind you that he is Hollywood’s last true star: a man like that, when he finally stumbles, puts on a show that few can resist.

At one point, Joyce Carol Oates, aged eighty-eight, raised her hand during X to say that she sensed a "sadistic joy" in those articles. Tom Cruise pointed out that there are films made to rake in the cash on their opening weekend and others that aim to become enduring classics of cinema. Like Magnolia, like Eyes Wide Shut. And like Digger. Even his critics know this.

Certainly, part of the disaster stems from the way it was marketed. Terrible. Bordering on self-sabotage. As if Warner’s marketing department had no idea what sort of film they had on their hands (which is highly likely). In 1968, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was the blockbuster on which a struggling MGM was staking a great deal. The advertising promised “an epic of adventure and exploration”; audiences went in expecting 1950s-style science fiction and found twenty minutes of apes, eerie silences and Strauss waltzes. Scathing reviews; cinemas emptying at the interval. Then at MGM they realised that long-haired hippies were turning up for the late screenings, all there to enjoy some LSD in the front row before the cosmic journey in Cinerama, to infinity and beyond. A new, very psychedelic poster appeared, bearing the slogan “The ultimate trip”.

Within a year, it had become the film of the counterculture, with John Lennon declaring he watched it every week, and intellectuals filling pages with philosophical ramblings about the monolith. Will the same happen with "Digger"? It remains to be seen. Warner gave it a go at the last minute, with an advert that said “you decide” and another – which disappeared within a few hours – that juxtaposed the praise from European newspapers with the American dismissals. "Digger is expected to play in the same league as those Netflix films you flick through whilst drifting off to sleep," wrote Guia Soncini in a major piece on Linkiesta, and that is precisely the problem. The word "comedy" was perhaps meant to be reassuring. Iñárritu was the first to use it; whilst writing the script, he says he had Lubitsch’s We Want to Live! in mind: an ode to the theatre, a monument to actors’ narcissism, a colossal mockery of the Nazis filmed at a time when the Nazis were winning everywhere (yes, Lubitsch managed to pack all that into ninety minutes). It ended with Variety repeating that "Digger isn’t funny" –

This is akin to asserting that there are few explosions in Oppenheimer – a film that repeatedly reminds viewers that it ‘is not’ Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, which was a true satire on the follies of power, unlike this one (one would be curious to meet those who find Strangelove side-splitting, by the way). In Digger you do laugh, but not as much as the tagline promised. Iñárritu overestimates today’s audience. An audience that wants films to be like an organised tour: the tour guide with his umbrella raised, gathering them round before every scene, explaining what they’re watching and what they’re supposed to think of it before they get back on the coach. Critics are the sort who, for example, criticised Tarantino for the ending of Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, because he saved Sharon Tate rather than having her massacred by Charles Manson’s gang (thanks for pointing that out), in a film that has Once Upon a Time in its title (and Digger, for that matter, opens with a curtain rising).

If you say ‘comedy’ to this audience, they will think of something light-hearted; they will not expect to find themselves rooting, even for just five minutes, for Digger Rockwell: despicable, terrifying, and yet also likeable and human, like all well-written villains. Today’s audience would hate three-quarters of Italian comedy. They’d be calling for Bruno Cortona’s head – the man who, at the end of Il Sorpasso, gets back up from the bend without a scratch whilst Trintignant lies at the bottom of the embankment: the idea that the smooth operators always get away with it sends the wrong message.

‘Digger’ contains several misguided messages for everyone. The film packs at least three distinct narratives into a single work. The first would even appeal to a mother and daughter going through ‘NAZA’ withdrawal: it is a story condemning capitalism and the System—always monstrous, always daft, always American (never Putin, never the ayatollahs, never China). It features a perfect villain to hate—or rather, two: a Texan oil tycoon with a bloated belly and a deranged president who is always scratching his arse. The second is a mockery of those satires of power designed specifically to reassure the audience that they are on the right side—hence didactic, predictable, always the same old story. The third nods to the poster for Cassavetes’ Opening Night, which can be glimpsed behind Tom Cruise in a couple of scenes: yes, you’re watching something about the hyperbolic intermingling of truth, fiction and catharsis, which in the meantime have become more complicated than ever (at least Gena Rowlands didn’t have Instagram). Finally, there is the monologue—the ten-minute sequence everyone is discussing, often taking it at face value: too political, not political enough, possibly complicit yet courageous, bearing a protest message or lacking one. In essence, a rally.

Which is, in fact, a ‘Richard III’-style take on Tom Cruise’s stunts: no aeroplanes, no skyscrapers, just him, that looming light, the European Parliament transformed into an Elizabethan theatre with wrestling-style shouts, and the villain stealing the show. In the end, "Digger" dupes all its viewers: those who want to save the planet, those who hate billionaires, those who love to hate films with a political message, and those who think they’re smarter than the first three. "Digger" is a film about our need for a villain to blame for all the world’s ills. At the cinema, in life, in the newspapers – and the “sadistic joy” Oates spoke of is its final scene, shot outside the cinema. To the villain, however, “Digger” gives the best lines, the best lighting, and the face of Tom Cruise. Because, at heart, it is simply the portrait of a magnificent, unpalatable scoundrel. And here we are in the realm of pure Warner Bros. philosophy.

During the Golden Age, each studio cultivated its own speciality: MGM boasted divas, grand staircases, Art Deco chandeliers, and ‘more stars than in the sky’. Paramount had champagne, Marlene Dietrich, and Parisian bedrooms recreated in Hollywood. Universal had the monsters. And Warner had little money. It was the studio of the Depression: seventy-minute films, low lighting, stories taken from crime reports. Instead of beauties, the studio featured boxers’ faces: Cagney, Robinson, Bogart. The censors demanded that they die in the end: Warner complied in the final five minutes, but in the other sixty-five, he made the audience love them. Jack Warner had realised one thing before anyone else: in the cinema, the good guys must win, but you leave remembering the villain. And for a century, he lined them up one after the other.

James Cagney, Bette Davis – who played the villain better than any man – Alex from "A Clockwork Orange", Jack Nicholson with the axe in "The Shining" (another film that was savaged at the time); De Niro and Joe Pesci in "Goodfellas", all the Jokers, and even Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tunes villain we’ve always rooted for. Digger Rockwell is the last in the line-up, with his grandad’s spade, his mangy cat and his big Texan hat. It is notable that the swan song of a studio that helped make Hollywood great—its spectacular exit from the stage just before becoming “Skydance”—is such a bold and reckless film, a grand portrait of a great scoundrel with the face of Tom Cruise in a care home: a $200 million anti-blockbuster that may never recoup its costs. That’s all, folks!