"Tom Cruise’s latest film is a crude parable about an unrepentant oil executive."
"If you scroll down on the list of “Carbon Majors,” the 178 producers that are responsible for most of the world’s fossil fuel emissions, you will eventually get to a company called Continental Resources. This firm is ranked around 150, well after giants like Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil, but it has still produced almost 600 million tons of carbon dioxide since 2005 alone, equivalent to the combined carbon footprint of around 2 million Americans over that same time. The founder of this company is a man named Harold Hamm, the spitting image of an American oil executive — he grew up dirt-poor in Oklahoma and worked his way into fracking riches, but he still speaks with a Southern drawl. He now uses his wealth to influence the government, raising millions of dollars for Republican candidates and funding crusades against green energy.
If you squint, the protagonist of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger could pass for Hamm, or for the Hamm-like archetype that has bled into the American psyche. The film centers around an oil executive named Digger Rockwell, a Texas-accented plutocrat who has built his father’s wildcat oil company into a global concern with offshore rigs in Greenland and Alaska. As depicted by Tom Cruise, he is the ideal of the Southern businessman-ideologue, partial to monogrammed private jet seats and roaring rants about his own genitalia. Other than making money, his sole concern seems to be the welfare of his white cat Maggie, whom he is trying to keep alive against veterinary advice even as she decomposes in his arms.
Digger examines two questions. First, how much responsibility does such an individual bear for the deaths and displacements caused by global climate change? Second, what is the right way for an artist to consider the first question? If you think you already know the answers to these questions, this may be the movie for you, though I can’t promise you’ll enjoy watching it. In trying to construct a fable about the hubris of oil titans like Hamm, Iñárritu has produced a film that says nothing except what the viewer already knows. He is all too aware that political parables about corporate greed are of limited artistic value, but he can’t manage to escape the confines of parable. The result is a mess of shrieking and spittle that will leave even the most climate-conscious viewers reaching for an Advil."
