Vanity Fair

Brother Bro

It’s hard to know whether you’re even supposed to LIKE Digger, which is at war with its own existence. What came through for me was the struggle to make art that actually moves people towards… anything impactful. Iñarritu seems entirely cynical about what storytelling can do in the face of impending catastrophe. What can be said that hasn’t been said already? How can he reconcile the audience’s desire to be entertained, the passive nature of consumption, and his hubris in thinking he is part of the answer?Digger is about the messiness and chaos in that pursuit. It indulges in crude, rudimentary satire as much as it reviles itself for doing it. It monologues maddeningly to the point of incoherence. It hates itself for getting Tom Cruise to jump around like a clown as much as it wants to dazzle you. I didn’t find this pointless. It made me reflect on what I as a consumer of stories want from them in the first place, and I felt like I watched an artist wrestle with that honestly.A critical question in Digger is, where is it pointing fingers? If it points fingers at powerful people, is that actually comforting for the audience? Does that enable us to continue doing nothing? If it points at us, how capable are we really at making personal and cultural change? It illuminates how climate inaction wins over action, and how there’s no clear way we’re going to break that cycle. The movie doesn’t have the answers, because if it did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.And sure, it IS on powerful people do fucking do something. But the way the world is set up, we can’t make them. Nothing this work of art of any other says or does will change that. So instead, Digger shows us how we’re being pacified, yells at us that it’s doing it this very thing to you right now, and lets you sit in the dread of all of it