Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, Digger, has been critically panned all over the world. The Boston Globe gave it 0 stars; The Guardian called it “shallow, laborious” and “the most disappointing film of the year”. So far, it is also a commercial disaster: having cost more than $250m (€223m) to make and market, it only took $8m (€7.1m) domestically during its first week in cinemas. Some are predicting that it will be the greatest flop of all time.
This must be prompting some reflection for the Mexican director whose previous films (The Revenant and Birdman) were universally adored by critics, showered with awards and did good business. In contrast, Digger’s star, Tom Cruise, has had to live with the cognitive dissonance of (mostly) scathing reviews versus billion-dollar box office for his entire career. He doesn’t help matters by being so weird, having such a messy private life and all that Scientology nonsense. Perhaps Digger might have been judged less harshly with, say, Gary Oldman in the lead?
Then this happened: I am at dinner with friends in Copenhagen and mention the mauling that Digger has received around the world. An art director whose judgement I usually trust on these matters looks perplexed. “What do you mean? It’s a masterpiece! Politiken gave it six stars.” Others round the table agree. “The Danish critics loved it!” says another guest. She likens it to Citizen Kane and Dr Strangelove. Now it is my turn for a dose of discombobulating dissonance. Had I stumbled into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type scenario? Were my friends secret Scientologists?
I had been out of Denmark for a few days, so had only seen the UK and US reviews, but my friends were right. And it wasn’t just the left-wing broadsheet Politiken that gave it full marks; so did the right-leaning Jyllands-Posten. Nearly all other Danish media platforms gave Digger a maximum score, calling it the “film of the year”, “Cruise’s best performance ever” and so on. Global media told me it was a turkey; Danish reviewers called it a work of genius. Who to believe?
Leaving this film aside, I wondered whether this kind of extreme critical schism had ever happened before. I have heard that London theatre critics used to meet after previews to make sure that they were roughly in agreement about whether a production was awful or brilliant. Having attended film critic screenings as a journalist, I can attest that there is some discussion after film previews too. This can’t work internationally, of course, but the response to Digger still seemed extraordinarily polarised. It turns out that there are precedents: the Internet tells me that Kevin Costner’s notorious 1995 flop, Waterworld, was huge in Japan. Scandinavian audiences will probably be the only ones to recall Antonio Banderas’s 1999 disaster, The 13th Warrior (they liked it because there were Vikings in it, apparently). German critics actually said good things about the Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp snorefest, The Tourist, while French cineastes famously worshipped Jerry Lewis as an artistic genius, much to the confusion of Americans. More recently, French critics also praised Ella McCay, last year’s already-forgotten James L Brooks political comedy, which has a dismal 23 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
I went to see Digger for myself. The cinema was fuller than usual: another indication beyond my friends’ responses that film critics still have some power. It wasn’t awful, just very on the nose and exhausting, with highly strung performances and a plot that meanders down strange dead-ends. Not since Bradley Cooper in Maestro has an actor targeted an Oscar so strenuously but I fear that Cruise has little chance of getting to deliver his presumably much-polished Best Actor lecture. One does sympathise with Sandra Hüller though. Such a brilliant, nuanced actor, required here merely to scream and gurn.
But that’s just my opinion.
The post Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ is dividing critics – but for most, it has dug its own grave appeared first on Monocle.