I perhaps shouldn’t say too much about this film, for reasons I shouldn’t say too much about. The point is, a bit of a surprise comes along after around half an hour. Normally, you wouldn’t hold back revealing such a thing when it comes this early in a movie, but on this occasion it seems fairest to stay mum. And staying mum also has the benefit of keeping this review shorter than it otherwise could be.
The movie, by the way, is exceptional – the latest sprawling and brawling dive by Alejandro G Iñárritu into the soul of some grizzly guy who’s in the midst of a teetering crisis. After Michael Keaton in Birdman (2014), Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant (2015) and Daniel Giménez Cacho in Bardo (2022), it’s the turn of Tom Cruise to be the bloke in a bind – reminding us whether we like it or not that he’s a fine, layered actor, even if we might have waited more than three decades since Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and two since Magnolia (1999) to be fully reminded of that, while he’s been busy jumping off things and tackling never-ending countdown clocks.
Well, here’s another countdown clock. Cruise is a corpulent, bandy-legged, mouth-from-the-South oil titan named Digger Rockwell living in a vast robber-baron lair in the American wilds. He has the survival of humanity dumped in his lap when one of his oil wells blows up and snaps off a giant piece of ice shelf, threatening to flood the globe.
Across the first half-hour, Iñárritu builds the crisis with a comic expressionism and steely control worthy of Dr Strangelove. Riz Ahmed plays a boffin and still voice of reason trying to speak truth to the heedless oligarch and the trumpety-trump US top brass who assemble at the sufferance of an elephantine President (John Goodman) and his lily-stomached VP (Michael Stuhlbarg).
Just as we think this is all a bit beyond-Coen-Brothers daft, we’re slapped by Iñárritu into realising that (a) yes it is, and (b) no it very much isn’t, as if the director has hacked into two sides of our brain and is puppeteering them independently. One or two things tell us that the walls of Cruise’s huge fin-de-siècle house are not that solid, particular the fourth wall.
Amid broad performances that would chew carpets if the floors weren’t timber, Digger’s shonky animatronic cat, and views out the window that are like curated Hudson River School panoramas, the director knows he can’t keep this satiric shtick up indefinitely without putting our teeth too much on edge (as arguably they were in other recent apocalyptic comedies like Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up).
It turns out that Cruise isn’t in flight from truthfulness but determined to hunt it down. What follows is one of the most effective movie blasts against climate denial we’ve seen: Digger manages to be bouncily facetious and bleakly galling within the same unified tale. It’s a very filmic offering about a world of theatricality, a mind-stretching epic made out of a chamber piece. It’s strange the way the most cinematic of filmmakers often get drawn back to the primordial DNA of the stage.
The artichoke-like movie has a Pirandellian self-consciousness along with a fleetness of tone, text, performance and VistaVision photography that’s nervelessly good. And maybe I should let things rest there.
