Iñárritu's 'Digger' skewers oil money and political farce in a biting black comedy

A velvet curtain parts across the IMAX screen like a camera aperture opening. Before the story proper begins, the artificial veil between audience and screen is drawn back first.

What floods in is an opulent, decadent space lifted wholesale from 17th-century European Old Masters — antique sofas and beds that blur the line between set dressing and flat painting, period furniture frozen in time. At the center of this stagnant tableau, an old man with skin as pale and soft as flour-dusted dough lets out a long, languid yawn. The flesh sagging beneath his thinning hair seems too heavy to bear the weight of his own greed. Even the cat curled beside him has lost every last sheen from its coat.

The old man extends a pinky finger toward the mouth of his beloved elderly cat, Maggie, stirring a morsel of oily tuna in an attempt to coax her into eating. The dying animal refuses even that final kindness, relieving herself instead on the aged butler below.

He is Digger Rockwell — the richest man on earth. A third-generation oil baron who worships as family gospel the founding myth of an ancestor who drove a single shovel into the ground and drew up "black gold" from the earth's heart. Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Digger," which opened Thursday, begins by sealing the most powerful and repugnant embodiment of capital into a glass display case and putting it on show.

The audience is granted a voyeur's view of the eccentric oil baron's morning routine — and that serene, classical calm is violently shattered at the 30-minute mark. During a clandestine meeting between Digger (Tom Cruise) and US President Comson (John Goodman) over plans to cover up a drilling-platform collapse, a stagehand's enormous hand suddenly intrudes from the edge of the frame. When an actor freezes and forgets his lines, the camera lurches backward out of the set to reveal lighting rigs, theater seats and a director's furious shouts.

The film tears apart the world the audience had taken for reality. What exactly is this movie? It operates as a play-within-a-film, two worlds coexisting in the same frame. The first 30 minutes the audience watched were the rehearsal of a stage production called "Fossil Fools." Cruise moves between two identities throughout: Curtis Markson, a stage actor, and Digger Rockwell, the character he plays.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the film opts not for a film-within-a-film but for a triple-layered play-within-a-film structure. This device is "Digger's" decisive aesthetic gambit. A film-within-a-film offers the audience a sense of relief — the moment they step outside the set, they escape the layers of fiction. Theater, by contrast, presupposes simultaneity through the coexistence of stage and auditorium. Because actors and audience share the same time and space, theater asks its audience to believe in the world before them even while knowing it is fiction. That is the unspoken compact between stage and seats.

Iñárritu brings that tacit collusion into the film itself. Speaking to the Indian outlet Hindustan Times, he said, "We are in a constant reality show, and everything is performative," adding that "there are so many narratives and fragmented realities inside our phones that it's hard to even figure out where we are or how we're talking about a shared reality." That is why "Digger" adopts the play-within-a-film form. Just as theater is often called a mirror of its age, the film uses the nested structure to visualize the present reality and to show who is narrating it, and how.

The world depicted in the play-within-the-film "Fossil Fools" is blunt, one-dimensional and kitsch. Its characters are strikingly flat.

President Comson, who equates himself with America itself, is the embodiment of vanity and inflated self-regard. Digger, the supremely self-centered oil baron, is a ruthless operator who reframes his own desires as the desires of all humanity and recasts himself as savior rather than perpetrator. Then there is the defense secretary — incompetent, yet carrying American supremacism, militarism, racism and sexism all at once. To mock the characters' ignorance and prejudice, the film gives them deliberately offensive dialogue and renders them as walking political memes.

These shallow, one-dimensional characters are, intriguingly, lifelike. The political language of this world has already been flattened into caricature. Nuanced policy, deliberation and historical context were discarded long ago. The president is a delusional figure who blames the glacial collapse and climate disaster caused by a drilling platform — itself the product of political-business collusion — on a "joint offensive by Russia and China," and who proclaims that America's military supremacy can prevail even against nature.

Iñárritu does not craft a precise political satire so much as amplify a reality that has already turned farcical into an even more absurd farce. The young director of the play-within-the-film reads almost as his own mouthpiece. The exaggeration does not distort the present world or its senior American officials — it feels like a deliberate artistic choice born from the recognition that reality itself has already become exaggerated.

The film belongs to Tom Cruise. For half a century he has lived as the indestructible "American hero" — Maverick in "Top Gun," Ethan Hunt in "Mission: Impossible" — but here he draws on three distinct personas.

The three layers are: Tom Cruise the real-life superstar; Curtis Markson, a stage actor who receives news that his daughter has gone missing over the Caribbean in a climate disaster; and Digger Rockwell, the arrogant oil monster on stage who drives the planet toward ruin.

Digger Rockwell — his face distorted with prosthetics, his scalp thinned by partial hair loss, his sagging belly and backside on full display — strips away every trace of the lean, heroic physicality audiences associate with Tom Cruise. The spectacle of a world-saving actor's body reduced to the ugly fetish object of American capitalism, rotted by greed and corruption, becomes a metaphor in itself.

A roughly 10-minute uncut, single-take monologue in which Digger Rockwell holds forth from a podium before the European Parliament is one of the film's most compelling passages. It is the moment when the perpetrator who has everything stands before the entire world and unleashes his logic around his own responsibility. As Cruise thunders that it was all of humanity — indulging in cheap fossil fuels and the comforts of civilization, free-riding on unsustainable prosperity — who bears the blame, his gaze transcends mere villainy. In that moment, borrowing the face of a hero to conscript the audience into complicity, the scene tightens its grip on the viewer's throat. It should jolt the audience into awareness, though the film ultimately does not push with quite enough force to fully deliver that blow.

Curtis, the actor playing Digger Rockwell, and Hannah (Sophie Wilde), the director, clash at every turn.

Their conflict is a standoff between Curtis's bourgeois realism — his desire to restore the catastrophe as humanist anguish — and Hannah's radicalism, which holds that reality itself is already a third-rate farce and only grotesque caricature can expose the truth. Curtis is tormented by the play he is making, finding it grotesquely exaggerated and flat, and suffering through a directorial approach that insists on turning everything into comedy. He is an actor who believes that "performance must be truthful, and only truthful performance can move an audience."

Yet the play-within-the-film, in which White House officials reduce catastrophe to the language of military security and memes, may look absurd — but it is precisely because it is so shallow that it uncannily, chillingly resembles the post-truth politics we actually witness.

Ultimately the film refuses to settle for political satire and confronts the cold logic of capital power head-on. Even after Digger dies by suicide and the president dies, the system simply transfers power and rolls on without a crack. Power tolerates no vacuum, and America does not fall. The final scene of the dead president is, notably, staged to look strikingly like Donald Trump.

The film mocks and twists every character in its orbit. The figure who mediates between actor and director is a fascinating one: the de facto financier behind "Fossil Fools" — Kenny Rockwell (Jesse Plemons), Digger's nephew and heir to the family fortune. He lavishes praise on Curtis's acting, and after watching audiences curse and applaud the story of his own uncle, he buys the rights to the production.

He did not commission and fund the play to atone for his family's sins. He staged it to let the public consume tragedy as a comedic object of ridicule, feel catharsis, and in doing so have their will to resist the system quietly neutered. The sharp confrontation between actor and director is absorbed into this enormous investor's rhetoric. Capital sits above art.

"Digger's" final blow only reveals itself at the very end of the film. The disaster is not disclosed on stage but in a closing sequence — after the play ends and the theater doors open. When the actors have taken their curtain call to thunderous applause, an emergency environmental broadcast — "Level 4" — suddenly blares through the auditorium. The audience files out of the venue, which seats at least 2,000, donning gas masks with practiced ease. Having laughed at the incompetent, foolish rulers and returned to reality, they step into a dystopia more devastating than anything on stage. Streets are flooded, cars piled up like a scrapyard, and physical robots lurch along the pavement.

Attentive viewers may have pieced together the ending from the hints Iñárritu scattered conspicuously across all 135 minutes. The decrepit backstage — plagued by power outages and leaks — has actors catching dripping water in red buckets even during performances. Yet cutting-edge technology coexists: scripts projected via mirrors, video calls in progress. The closing landscape, which gathers up the foreshadowing seeded from the very beginning, is the near-future Earth. The play itself is armed with unprecedented grand sets and graphics bankrolled by a major investor's fortune, but backstage is a dystopia — flooded with gray seawater, soldiers and drones prowling the corridors.

The aperture that opened the film was never a door into fiction. It was a device to lock the audience inside the theater and force them to confront a reality already in ruins. The world we walk out into every day after leaving the theater — that is the grandest and most absurd stage of all for "Fossil Fools."