Skip to main content

Digger, or How I Learned to Wallow in Dread Against the Futility of Satire

I'll say this for Alejandro G. Iñárritu -he comes closer to the mark of Dr. Strangelove than Adam McKay did. Feint praise, but it's not nothing.
We are living through times that defy satire. There is very little in the main narrative of Iñárritu's new film Digger that feels legitimately outrageous. Its premise, its characters, and even their bluntness about their own amoral priorities feels substantially less shocking or scandalous than they might have even twenty years ago. Mocking the clowns in power and how they will destroy the world is an exercise that has lost its sting. It's not that it is too close to home, it's that it lacks sufficient hyperbole. 
Perhaps that is why Digger tries so hard to cultivate humour in broader ways, ways that Iñárritu is not particularly adept at. The actions at play themselves don't feel ludicrous enough, so colouring them in overblown performances and gross-out comedy may be the way to accentuate them. A trigger-happy U.S President driven by conspiracy theories and a refusal to take accountability isn't so far-fetched, so he must be saddled with an embarrassing rectal cancer. A billionaire oil magnate who couldn't care less about environmental destruction until it effects his bottom-line -those are a dime a dozen in late-stage American capitalism; he ought to be singled out by a weird relationship with a disgustingly sickly pet cat. Saying the quiet part out loud at the U.N. has been done? What if the particularly unscrupulous individual ranted and raved about humanity's twisted collective greed while prancing crudely on the desks of a scandalized room of international diplomats? And what do these bewildering circus acts aid in communicating? Not much that is useful or insightful.
To the film's credit, it is not one to shy away from tremendous swings -starting with the casting of Tom Cruise, under significant prosthetics, as Digger Rockwell -an elderly oil baron whose company's lax safety protocols result in a methane explosion that dislodges a massive ice shelf in Greenland. Drifting into the North Sea it threatens ecological devastation on much of Europe and then the world. Digger works with an impulsive and hapless U.S. government on a plan to mitigate at least the public relations disaster before involving himself in the effort to neutralize the ice sheet and its consequences.
All of this is played with those heightened farcical elements alluded to, and the thing is Iñárritu seems to agree they are too excessive. At the very least he demonstrates a little sympathy with those that do, commenting openly on the absurd behaviours of these characters and their responses to dire circumstances. It is rendered primarily through a key metatextual layer to the film more interesting than the plot of the main story itself. It may be a structural (and occasional stylistic) reference to Wes Anderson -Asteroid City in particular. A competing narrative that, without disclosing it fully, actively comments on the story of Digger, its zealous comic licence, and the very purpose of art commenting on travesty -which is, more than evil billionaires and callous governments bringing about our collective destruction, what the movie is actually really about. And there Iñárritu does hit on something conceptually very interesting. Only he does keep returning to the silly sideshow. 
There the situation escalates in that very Dr. Strangelove fashion; ego and a pathological impulses towards force overriding common sense -the chief scientist in all of this, hysterically desperate to convey the severity of the situation, is Riz Ahmed's Doctor Ganesh openly dismissed by the administration out of racism. Iñárritu doesn't pull punches in this way, bluntly highlighting the worst traits of U.S. government officials with venom. It doesn't actually mean anything. The same is true of Digger's diatribe at the U.N. -though impressively, dynamically staged and performed, its show of abject crassness, relishing in power, greed and no accountability is like an exercise of a particularly slimy cynicism. There is nothing smart or thoughtful there, just a glut of bile on why we are in such a mess, a gross pride in that mess coloured by truth but utterly bereft of insight. It has a tenor of self-satisfied pretension about it (not unlike McKay in this instance), as though Iñárritu and his three co-writers are above their audience for pointing this out and doing so with such vehement mockery. Lampshading this style choice with a contextual acknowledgement of some of this such criticism does little to change its effect.
And it's not like the movie doesn't have a bleak enough outlook already. The narrative of Digger plainly communicates there is nothing we can do against figures of power, small-minded and proudly ignorant. I suppose it is sobering in a way. We are forced to take the hand they deal us and reckon with their consequences as best we can. And the choice by Iñárritu to factor in art as a critical means of that is at least something intellectually invigorating, even if his conclusions here are also tinged by existential cynicism. The film grapples openly with art colouring, sometimes obscuring truth for the sake of a particular emotional response -catharsis, as is the case here- and interrogates the role of satire itself in making light of dark or depressing situations it is unable to have an effect on. Very interesting questions that are posed, and ones that Iñárritu confusingly comes down on both sides of -acknowledging the power of art as an important vessel for processing grief and hardship, yet deriding the simplicity craved by an audience in receiving this; validating satire in some way presumably by the nature of this movie and the attention paid to its most outrageous tenets, whilst mocking its very concept as something that serves no practical function and is just an empty way of making us feel good -the closing moments of the movie really coming down hard on this. Though the exercise is engaging, nothing is ultimately drawn by these themes, the film choosing to undercut what higher sentiments it does express and wallow in bleakness.
This at least isn't what Cruise winds up doing. It is a fascinating thing that Tom Cruise of all people is at the centre of all this. It perhaps takes the cake as his most deranged performance, and to that end it is certainly novel to witness. It is a bit aimless though and Cruise is noticeably more comfortable through the less hysterical dimension of his character. John Goodman as the President doesn't get the same luxury, and beyond the scope of what his character undergoes looks visibly ill and uncomfortable through the film. Ahmed overplays a lot of his scenes while Sandra Hüller as Digger's sister underplays hers. I always like to see Michael Stuhlbarg, but his Vice President is an empty shell.  The only actors who manage to turn out truly decent performances with this material are Sophie Wilde and Jesse Plemons, and they are the kind of roles not meant to stand out against the greater insanity.
What is of course meant to stand out is Iñárritu's direction and the visual aesthetics of his film. In this respect, he returns to some of his choices from Birdman, such as the flat colour grading and theatrical set designs. Digger's home is a cornucopia of gaudy western paraphernalia and status symbols of insecure masculinity -mounted heads of every conceivable animal, a wildly impractical globe desk, guns, and classical paintings and sculptures symbolizing nothing but wealth. By contrast, the fictitious U.N. is nearly barren -the waiting spaces outside empty and moldy and the hall itself rather small and modestly attended -disturbingly (intentionally) designed to evoke fascist architecture. Very particular and in some places compelling choices, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the film with skill but restraint -though the camera does still follow characters a bit haphazardly and chooses some very blunt angles. Iñárritu brings some character to the artificiality he is playing with and it may be one of the movie's rare charming features. If only he were to render the same enthusiasm for something more substantial in the mood of the piece.
Digger is an enormous movie and very definitive as an encapsulation of its artists' aims. And it is an impressive movie for this, even respectable -especially as an exemplar of a dying breed of movie (and indeed Digger may well have killed it permanently). But for its monumental vision it does not deliver on either the social commentary or the profundities it gestures towards. Its messaging, particularly on the apparent futility of art to make a difference, is potent but rather hollow, and you wonder why Iñárritu made the film in the first place if this was the attitude he wished to express. I suppose an anti-catharsis picture has some function. A fascinating, engaging, unpredictable mess, only marginally more satisfying than the present one it alludes to.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
1 comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
14 comments
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more