Louise and I went to see Digger this weekend. Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.
That Tom Cruise made the movie at all blew my mind; this guy has spent his entire career being the most apolitical no-issues superstar in Hollywood. Something has shifted when that guy puts on a fat suit and a tangle of white hair to play a Texas oil baron who wrecks the planet.
Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made the movie The Revenant that won Leonardo DiCaprio — who is an outspoken advocate for climate action — an Oscar. Now it looks like Cruise has jumped on board, making what’s probably the best movie about climate change in a generation.
There’s been a concerted effort by rightwingers to convince you not to see the movie. Back in July, nearly 3 months before its release, a columnist at American Greatness was already warning Cruise’s “red-state base” that this was “yet another Hollywood feature warning us to treat Mother Nature with care… or else.”
Two days before it opened, Breitbart’s John Nolte, who in the same column calls climate change a “hoax,” dismissed it as an “attack on those of us who dare to use oil to better our lives” that “shames us for our standard of living, which is a direct result of the oil industry.” (He admits he’s working from other people’s reviews.) And the rightwing bots on social media have been going nuts, calling it “woke.”
It all probably parallels the Meta shutdown of No Kings this weekend, along with the billionaire-owned social media platforms’ refusal to advertise and apparent shadow banning of conversations about the new movies about Musk and Zuck.
For most of the first two-thirds of Digger I was mystified about this loud, deliberately — but still entertainingly — cartoonish satire; I wasn’t sure what kind of movie I was watching, and suspending disbelief was pretty much impossible.
But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing (I’m not going to give it away) and left me — and the audience in the theater with me, who sat in shocked silence at the end — astonished at how elegantly the entire thing was put together.
The movie in many ways reminded me of Dr. Strangelove and Network (both also criticized by rightwingers): it has that kind of impact and some truly great bits of dialogue that are right up there with Slim Pickens’s character and Peter Finch as Howard Beale.
That’s mostly when the oil baron Cruise plays owns up to everything: the lies, the bought-off politicians, the decades of knowing what they were doing to the atmosphere while lying to all of us about it. But then he turns the accusation around and suddenly the entire audience for his monologue is stunned.
He lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold