Digger

It’s been a little while since I saw Digger, and while I didn't love the film, I have thought about it quite a lot since. In a decade, will Digger be called a generational masterpiece? I don't think so. But I do think the urgency of its message is aspirational at the very least.

On the surface, I like this movie. I like the ideas that it's tackling. I just don't particularly love them in execution. It is so expansive in its ideas and yet it is also so unbearably shallow and lacking nuance.

There are moments of greatness - particularly the last five minutes are haunting and what has stayed with me most - but these are dragged down by the almost insufferable, and more importantly uninteresting, play that you are forced to sit through. The brief intermissions, where we learn about the world outside, are vastly more complex and interesting.

My frustrations lie in the missed opportunities that arise because of this being a play. The play surfaces a lot of large concepts surrounding our current treatment of our world, a world infected by capitalism and the people who preside over us, but the point that it's making during the play is a pretty shallow point, and it keeps hammering home that same point. It doesn't seek to dig deeper. I wish it would go further and not louder. This movie seems to scream its ideas in the hopes of adding depth but rarely is this true - perhaps Cruise's monologue excluded.

The film is far more interesting when the play stops and the artifice disappears. Nothing that's happening outside of the play is directly affecting it. The actor's concern for his daughter isn't really informing his performance and that feels strange; have him reckon with what's happening instead the play just plays out as it should.

The film falls victim to over-explaining everything to the audience; this happens directly with Jesse Plemons' monologue at the very end of the movie, which if you haven't caught on to what the movie is trying to say by that point, then it's a little worrying.

Unquestionably, it's undeniable this is a fascinating piece of work. Its thorniness is actually really interesting. But when watching the play, the shallowness, the overt, explicit declarations of its ideas and hammering home this point, are not that effective. It’s why the last five minutes of the movie are so effective because it's simple visual storytelling. You are understanding the world that these people live in, the consequences of the past, the harrowing future. There's so much to mine from those few minutes that I don't believe are present in the play.

As I said, I’ve thought a lot about this movie, but I do think it is more interesting as an idea than it is in its execution. And I do think the ideas it's grappling with are fascinating. I would like to give this film another go, but I also didn't want to bring myself to sit through that play again, because I don't find it all that compelling.