Is cinema a form of sleight of hand? Why shouldn’t it be? After all, its very effects, its ability to create illusions in order to reveal reality, are among the elements that distinguish cinema and make it such a popular and widely loved art form. But cinematic illusion is sometimes used to impress, sometimes to magnify, and sometimes even to confuse us. And if anyone thinks we are talking only about images, Alejandro Iñárritu has shown us that he can do exactly the same thing with a screenplay.
With a multilayered plot, certainly not something appearing for the first time in a film, where a work unfolds within another work, Digger has the structure of a Russian nesting doll, opening and closing to reveal the story that a group of creators are preparing, within the film that we know another group of creators has made. We don’t know this from the beginning — we start by watching a caricature of social criticism, superficial, typical of the Dem Agend, something like Don’t Look Up, until the clapperboard snaps and we realise that we are watching a theatrical rehearsal and can therefore breathe a sigh of relief: our time hasn’t been wasted just yet.
But while films of this kind usually focus on the creators of the inner performance once the initial “illusion” has been revealed, in Digger we see very little of the creators as creators, and much more of the characters invented for that fictional work within the film’s fictional world. The interruptions for criticism and commentary on the performance are so brief that they seem almost like an excuse — and while the performance unfolding before us is a caricature, these comments feel more like an attempt by the filmmaker to explain what he is making, having played with a screenplay within a screenplay that bears a striking resemblance to the script of our contemporary reality.
Staying within this caricature, the great reward is an extraordinary performance by Tom Cruise, in a role that goes against practically everything we have seen him do in the past — perhaps he needed it himself, to demonstrate that his calibre extends far beyond the almost monotonous repetition of similar characters.
The answer, however, to the question of “what is the artist trying to tell us?” comes only in the final scene, when we finally understand the time and context in which the filmmaker has situated the action of his film. Having spent more than two hours watching a film while constantly asking ourselves, “Does what I’m watching now actually mean what it appears to mean, or is there something else hidden inside its magician’s hat?”, it becomes rather difficult for the viewer to truly “absorb” all that time. We maintain an unjustifiably great distance from what is happening because we don’t know which of the things we are seeing are worth judging and which are already being judged.
But could this be precisely the director’s intention? To let us watch the first level (the innermost one) and, just as we accept its criticism, slap us in the face with the second (the intermediate and apparently outer level), only to come back at the very end, even if we have managed to escape that one too, and tell us: “Got you! You should have thought more carefully!” He may succeed in catching out a particular audience, perhaps the viewers of everyday television news bulletins, but how much can a filmmaker communicate with his viewer, the one who wants to absorb artistic expression precisely because he cannot bear to watch the “eight o’clock news”?
In Digger, Iñárritu has made a technically accomplished film only to exclude such a large part of the cinema-going public — and a plot twist is not enough to provide the depth that could have been given to the very subject he supposedly sets out to explore: an environmental catastrophe on a planetary scale for the sake of capitalist profit. Somehow, he spent his tokens in the wrong way, and the prophecy of a future dystopia is incapable of shaking up the comfortable critique of everyday propaganda.
