Reading the room: Tom Cruise rules in ‘Digger’.
DIGGER ***1/2 (129 minutes) MA
Swinging for the fences again, Tom Cruise goes full throttle as a voracious oil tycoon in a beautifully blistering black comedy that chimes in as an inventive, unusual, topical and funny take on a world heading in the wrong direction.
Donning several kilos of convincing prosthetic make-up, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a magnificently cliched capitalist billionaire hog whose oil operation in Greenland goes sideways, setting in train an unattractive series of events that could dent the tourist trade in Europe.
The rush to head off the pending calamity calls the president (John Goodman, sensational) and his circle to Digger’s mansion to size up the least-worst options available to keep the northern hemisphere safe.
Along for the bumpy ride is Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), a nerdy geo-scientist caught in a sandwich press of anger, frustration and the demands of moral compromise. It’s another top performance – though will he ever top what he did in Nightcrawler?
Again demonstrating his love of stretching himself, Cruise is superlative as an acidic, entitled oil oligarch, pulling off some impressive sequences including a marvellously surreal oner as he delivers a piercing speech. Cineastes familiar with the brilliant Orson Welles version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial will see strong echoes.
This is Tom in non-blockbuster mode, registering the latest in a long line of top turns in such works as Lions for Lambs, Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, Valkyrie, Eyes Wide Shut and American Made, the film that should have at least earned him an Oscar nod.
Presenting a prime example of how to do satirical movie messaging properly, director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel; The Revenant; Birdman; 21 Grams; Amores perros) deftly balances bellicose rants about capitalism and climate change with emotional gear shifts that fans will recognise as intrinsic to his distinctive style.
Bravely, Digger was shot in VistaVision, a format harking back to the 1950s when Hollywood, in response to the threat of television, sought to deliver audiences big-screen experiences they couldn’t get at home on their tiny cathode-ray tubes.
Rather than going for widescreen formats such as CinemaScope, VistaVision offered a large square-frame format with much greater detail by running film horizontally rather than vertically through a projector.
The film looks great, though the only place to see the film in true VistaVision is at Yarraville’s Sun Theatre, the only picture house in the southern hemisphere to do so, according to Mother.
VERITY *** (117 minutes) MA
In a fun, hi-gloss, decidedly trashy thriller Dakota Johnson does her doe-eyed, deceptive ingenue thing as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling mid-list New York author tasked with completing several novels by best-seller Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) who is paralysed and wheelchair bound after an accident.
Moving into her lovely house in the woods, she sets about organising all the preparatory notes when she discovers a manuscript that slowly reveals hidden details about her psyche and relationship with husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett).
While feeling inevitably attracted to Jeremy, Lowen is further distracted by flash visions of Verity moving in ways that are supposed to be medically impossible.
Based on yet another hit novel by Colleen Hoover (whose books It Ends With Us, Reminders of Him, Regretting You all spawned hit films), director Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye; The Big Sick) does a proficient job with all the mysterious atmosphere building and engineers some crowd-pleasing moments. He doesn’t quite press down on the eroticism pedal as much as he should, but that quibble aside it’s nicely rendered.
As with horror films, these emotionally driven drama thrillers have big return potential, their relatively low cost (around $40m, which is less than half a regular studio title) presenting a huge upside if it delivers what audiences expect, as is certainly the case with Verity.
THE GREAT ARCH ***1/2 (104 minutes) PG
The eternal tension between artistic vision and the imposition of compromise gets a good working over in a solidly dramatized account of how Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang) fought to bring his cube-like arch to 1980s Paris.
Carrying strong echoes of the 1949 Gary Cooper film The Fountainhead, he spends much of his time knocking heads with Jean-Louis Subileau (Xavier Dolan) who, to his credit, tries to explain reality to a dreamer. It’s good stuff, though the film ends rather suddenly. It feels like ten minutes is missing.