Tom Cruise, American hero – or so the movies tell us – stars in Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s new satire Digger as Digger Rockwell, billionaire oil baron. His flesh is sagged and liver-spotted, and he holds, practically attached to his teat, a white cat that is in imminent transition to carcass.
At first, Digger’s concerns begin and end with this sickly feline – he dips his digits into a pot of pale meat paste to feed it; lets it urinate in his bed every night, for the maid to clean up; and fires the vet who implores him to put the poor creature down. Then, with the chirp of a phone notification, Cruise’s oligarch has his routine inconveniently interrupted by the end of the world. Digger is told that his Greenland oil rig has created a rift in the ice shelf, and a sizeable chunk of glacier is headed straight towards Norway, ready to cause the apocalypse. He hurries to shift the blame by proclaiming himself as both seer and saviour. He abuses the scientist, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), tasked with delivering the truth, pretending to fall asleep when he starts to list Digger’s many committed atrocities. And he communes closely with the President of the US (John Goodman), who won’t let us forget that he’s likely about to die from “cancer of the asshole” and harbours increasingly messianic delusions about his fate.
