In Review: ‘Digger,’ ‘Verity’

Digger
Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
129 min.

Digger is a profoundly off-putting film (derogatory). Digger is a profoundly off-putting film (complimentary). Digger is a new satire by a director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, with no sense of humor, which did not stop him from winning Best Picture with the comparably annoying Birdman and did not stop Warner Bros. from giving him money to try his hand at a modern-age Dr. Strangelove, aimed at climate change and flush with allusions to the types of monsters who are currently destroying the planet. In its worst stretches, Digger can feel like being assigned the worst seat on the plane, even if you grudgingly acknowledge to yourself that this passenger is right about everything he’s ranting about. Yet Iñárritu’s willingness to pour all of his Hollywood capital into a project so strident and confrontational feels genuinely heroic, and certain to turn the film into a touchstone of present and near-future catastrophe. There’s just no sugar to make the bitter medicine go down. 

In a performance that squares the bluster and paunch of his Hollywood agent in Tropic Thunder with the malignant narcissism of his alpha-male motivational speaker in Magnolia, Tom Cruise doesn’t abandon his image so much as spam its most grotesque manifestation. Borrowing heavily from the ashen, apocalyptic deadpan of Roy Andersson’s brilliant 2000 satire Songs From the Second Floor, Iñárritu and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, present Cruise as a blustering captain of industry who’s lost the color associated with natural light and human affection. As Digger Rockwell, a name that channels the spirit of Strangelove’s Jack D. Ripper, Cruise wakes up alone next to the urine-soaked white feline that he’s been keeping as his sole companion, and it’s one the film’s few good running jokes that the cat looks like a deranged child’s plushie as it groans for mercy. The cat is a metaphor for his empire, or the planet, or something along those lines. 

Digger is the type of guy who solicits advice from experts so long as they tell him what he wants to hear, and on this morning, he’s cutting them all off mid-sentence, as if he’s staging a David Mamet play. As the scion of a Texas oil family that first struck black gold in 1917, Digger’s drill-baby-drill mentality has led to a crisis on a Greenland rig where his environmental experts are warning of a massive methane gas leak. Soon after he waves off the report, the entire operation collapses in an explosion that chips a state-sized ice shelf off in the ocean, where it bobs its way toward the coasts of England and Scandinavia. As his head of environmental safety, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), continues to annoy him with scenarios he refuses to acknowledge, Digger summons an emergency meeting with the President of the United States (John Goodman), his panicked VP (Michael Stuhlbarg), and an assortment of macho military types and Bible-thumping sycophants. Given a range of bad options to mitigate the crisis, they inevitably brainstorm a worse option from whole cloth. 

Iñárritu and his team of co-screenwriters—two of whom, Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris Jr., worked on Birdman, and a third, Sabina Berman, who’s a journalist and writer—add Digger’s half-sister Emma (Sandra Huller), an enviro-conscious entrepreneur, to the mix, but she’s mostly buried in the hectic collision of events. The contrast between the film’s opulent interiors and sunless gray wallpaper of the outside world underscores the disconnect between Digger’s cloistered wealth and the planet his family has defiled for generations. Yet the film’s true gnawing bifurcation lies between its artful, multi-layered, and audacious conceit and the tuneless, ham-handed blather that passes for satirical dialogue. To be as generous to Digger as possible, it feels like an Armando Iannucci rewrite away from being a masterpiece. But that distance is nonetheless as vast as a civilization-blitzing ice shelf. 

Such is the plague that continues to haunt Iñárritu, whose abundant ambition and technical skill keeps crashing against the rocks of his self-seriousness and poor judgment. There was a time when it seemed like getting away from Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter who wrote his Amores Perros then turned it into miserablist formula with 21 Grams and Babel, would help Iñárritu find his way, but then he brought the same tone to the execrable Biutiful. Though the survivalist adventure parts of The Revenant played to his strengths, Digger more closely resembles the self-conscious bravura of Birdman, which trampled all over its aspirations to comedy. All the Oscars rewarded his worst instincts, and now they’ve brought us here. 

Yet Iñárritu and his writers pull off a couple structural surprises in Digger that partially redeem it, and he goes mercifully light on the “transcendent” or metaphysical nonsense that wounded Birdman and The Revenant. Digger isn’t Dr. Strangelove and it probably can’t be, because Stanley Kubrick’s film warned about an absurd scenario that might happen and Iñárritu’s film is about a climate-change disaster that’s already well in progress. There are few laughs here but plenty of space to reckon with a dying planet that can’t shake loose from the Digger Rockwell types who have willfully and knowingly steered it toward extinction. It’s all so dumb and loud and hopeless, and Iñárritu volunteers to set his career on fire to point it out on the grandest possible scale. — Scott Tobias

Digger opens everywhere tonight.

Verity
Dir. Michael Showalter
117 min.

Sometimes a movie promises more than it can deliver. Early in Verity, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), the author of respected but little-read crime novels, stands on the corner of a New York street opposite the offices of her publisher, where she’s been summoned for a mysterious meeting. As she prepares to cross, a horrific accident unfolds mere feet in front of her, a car-on-motorcycle collision that leaves the cyclist dead and Lowen covered in blood. Foreshadowing doesn’t get more obvious or, for those who’ve shown up hoping for a high-gloss trashy thriller, more enticing. For a while, however, it looks like this Michael Showalter-directed adaptation of a 2017 Colleen Hoover novel will deliver on that promise and its dopey charms bring it almost close enough to count.

Lowen, it turns out, has been called in to help with a delicate issue. The bestselling Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) needs help finishing the next books in an ongoing series after being injured in a car accident and, Lowen’s told, she’s been handpicked as the writer best-suited for the task. Lowen, who’s avoided Verity’s work and has an aversion to “airport” books, is not sure she agrees. But with bills to pay, she agrees to a ghostwriting gig that requires her to move into Verity’s home, an absurdly luxurious ski lodge-like building overlooking a New England lake. When she arrives, Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) reveals that Lowen hasn’t been told the whole story. Verity’s catatonic, unable to walk or speak, much less put together a novel. It’s up to Lowen to get into Verity’s head. And when Lowen happens on a thumb drive containing Verity’s secret autobiography, she starts to realize that might not be the most pleasant place to be.

The film alternates between Lowen’s experiences writing the novel as she gets to know Jeremy and his son Crew (Brady Wagner) and dramatized scenes drawn from Verity’s confessional manuscript. (You don’t hire Anne Hathaway just to lay around in bed, after all.) These both reveal intimate moments from Jeremy and Verity’s life together—including an explanation of the toothmarks on the bed in which Lowen now sleeps—and shed new light on some troubling moments, particularly the drowning death of Crew’s twin sister. Maybe there’s a reason Verity was so good at telling stories from the perspectives of despicable villains?

The twisty story nods freely to Rebecca, Vertigo, and Jane Eyre, Showalter directs with an elegant eeriness that offsets its page-turner breathlessness, and Johnson’s gift for understatement suits a character whose own motives might not be entirely pure. It plays like the cinematic equivalent of one of Ashleigh’s hated airport books, which she admits to avoiding because she’s worried she’ll be drawn into them. It’s hard not to get drawn into Verity, too, but after a point, it becomes clear that its slow boil storytelling is never going to heat up fully and the film’s final revelations end up being more confusing than shocking. It’s trashy fun made by an overqualified creative team, but it struggles to find a finale memorable enough to match the literal bloodbath of its opening. —Keith Phipps

Verity is in theaters now.