Tom Cruise takes us to the end of the world

From Goya to Honoré Daumier, art has never stopped reminding the powerful that it has the capacity (and, perhaps, also the obligation) to strip them bare, deprive them of their human dimension, and turn the mockery of the calamities they leave behind as a legacy into catharsis. A sentiment that Digger makes its own in a literal way at the end of a twisted path of excess and an accumulation of layers of fiction that the film's marketing has wanted to keep secret until the last moment. The message is crystalline and poignant, but the way in which Alejandro G. Iñárritu stages it also seems like a justification. Or, rather, a clarification: this is not a farce, but a commentary on the meaning of making a farce.

It should not surprise us; after all, the cinema of the director of The Revenant has repeatedly shown itself to be impermeable to humor, even when it attempts a comedy, like Birdman. To begin with, this distances Digger from its immediate referent, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (a filmmaker who, for all his reputation as cerebral and intractable, always inoculated a certain mockery into his images), from which it takes the codes of a tale of catastrophic urgency and the desire to disguise the actors, particularly Tom Cruise, who embodies an oil tycoon leading the planet to environmental apocalypse.

But just because Digger lacks grace does not mean it is devoid of interest. On the contrary, its conviction in assuming an unsympathetic character is fascinating, especially when it exhibits affinities as alien to Hollywood as the work of Roy Andersson, whose milky and unhappy light seems to inspire Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography. However, the film's final minutes make it clear that, behind all the grotesque histrionics and ugliness, there are two cosmic egos, those of Cruise and Iñárritu, which cannot hide the desire to receive a final ovation for their audacity.