Tom Cruise is going to divide us this year, and that might be the most interesting thing about his Oscar prospects for “Digger.”
Depending on which screening you walked out of, it’s either the bravest swing of his late career or a miscalculation dressed up as one. Critics are divided, and audiences will be too. Typically, that reaction is a problem, but with Cruise, it might be what his campaign needs.
For the first time in a long time, he is starring in something the industry has to argue about rather than simply admire. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” is not what people are expecting, and how audiences react (via box office and word-of-mouth) will be the ultimate test of his star power.
Before the festivals began, I posed a question: How divisive (or bad) would “Digger” need to be for Tom Cruise to lose this season? Venice, Telluride and Toronto have come and gone and now we approach the moment of truth. But there’s a more interesting question percolating — what will a Cruise Oscar campaign ask the Academy to recognize?
“Digger” stars Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a wealthy tycoon who must save the world when one of his oil rigs malfunctions and causes an environmental catastrophe across the planet. The film also includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. The social embargo that lifted on Sept. 22 was mixed, with many praising Cruise’s performance but coming down hard on the film’s ultimate execution.
For the better part of two decades, Cruise has not presented as just a working actor. He has become a brand equivalent to Steven Spielberg, a symbol of moviemaking itself. His image is no longer attached to performances so much as to the theatrical experience, to physical risk, to movie-star mythology and to the idea that someone still wants to do it the old-fashioned way: make movies for a giant screen. He doesn’t need to explain himself because the moving pictures do the work — along with the smile, the running, the airplanes, the motorcycles and the impossible stunts.
That’s what makes his Oscar journey unusual. Cruise is one of the last major movie stars of the 1990s whose competitive Oscar story remains unfinished. The Academy has already honored his contemporaries — Will Smith for “King Richard,” Leonardo DiCaprio for “The Revenant,” Tom Hanks twice, Julia Roberts for “Erin Brockovich.” That was a generation built around stars whose names were the selling point, and Cruise’s roughly $1.88 billion (adjusted for inflation) domestic grosses put him squarely in that company. Even as his career has come to be defined by a global kind of theatrical power, he’s still just a boy standing in front of the voters asking them to choose him.
So what kind of movie has Cruise chosen for his latest attempt?
For Iñárritu, “Digger” is a significant swing coming off “Bardo,” which was pummeled by critics. This project feels like an attempt to reach back toward “Birdman” territory, when critics and audiences were in step with him. Iñárritu doesn’t seem to be simply directing a star synonymous with spectacle but dropping him into a film that is decidedly actor driven, one with auteurist ambitions. That’s something we haven’t seen from Cruise since teaming with Paul Thomas Anderson for 1999’s “Magnolia.”
I respect the swing. Cruise and John Goodman are both delivering stellar work and could find themselves within arm’s length of nominations. I found Sophie Wilde to be the best in show, bringing a performance that lingers after the argument about everything else around her dies down.
The superb Goodman is as he has been for decades — one of those dependable veteran actors still waiting on a first invitation to the dance. With comical and genre-varying triumphs like “Barton Fink,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Argo,” he’s still got it. If voters want a reason to finally recognize him, “Digger” gives them one. Riz Ahmed occupies what feels like the Philip Seymour Hoffman space — a presence that elevates whatever he’s in, even in a contained part. Sandra Hüller, meanwhile, is having a remarkable four-movie year, but “Digger” gives her less to work with than “Fatherland,” “Rose” or “Project Hail Mary” — the least likely of the four to land a nomination.
On the technical side, the opportunities are clearer. Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki behind the camera is reason enough to sit up, and we’ve missed him; that puts cinematography and production design well within reach, with makeup and hairstyling undoubtedly in the conversation. That will help reinforce the movie as a filmmaking experience, and not as only a Cruise vehicle.
Cruise’s most significant Oscar swing in years is a movie that asks audiences to take a position, and that’s a much riskier way to campaign for a statue.
As we look at his filmography and history with awards, we see a worthy career capper. He was nominated for an acting Oscar three times inside a 10-year stretch. He was the Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), a raw, furious turn that won him the Golden Globe and lost the Oscar to Daniel Day-Lewis (“My Left Foot”). He was the flailing sports agent in Cameron Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire” (1996), and lost to Geoffrey Rush (“Shine”). And then came his Frank T.J. Mackey, the predatory guru in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999), a supporting turn that seemed like it would be “the one” before losing out to Michael Caine, who walked away with a second statue for “The Cider House Rules.”
The Cruise who chased those nominations was angling to work with the most demanding filmmakers alive: Stone, Anderson, Stanley Kubrick on “Eyes Wide Shut,” Michael Mann on “Collateral.” Then, sometime in the 2000s, a different Cruise took over, the star whose name alone could still fill a theater. He hung off the side of an airplane, climbed the Burj Khalifa and turned “Mission: Impossible” into a decades-long experiment in testing his own limits.
And when the theatrical business was seemingly on its deathbed during the pandemic, he dragged audiences back with “Top Gun: Maverick,” which earned him a best picture nomination as a producer — the closest he’d come to the Oscar stage in years (but without an acting nomination).
That’s what is at the center of this season. The very thing that makes Cruise the “last great movie star” may be what has kept the Oscar from him. Spectacle doesn’t usually win acting trophies, and neither does sincerity in service of a franchise. The Academy rewards the side of Cruise’s career he left behind, and he left it behind because the other lane needed him more. He stopped needing the Academy — until that became the one thing box office couldn’t buy.
The Academy has already given Cruise an Oscar of sorts. Last year, it bestowed him with an honorary award, the industry’s way of acknowledging what he has meant to the movies. It’s a gesture of respect, but it can carry a different message: We know we never gave you the competitive one, so here’s the gold so the town can close this chapter. That doesn’t mean he will automatically lose. Paul Newman took an honorary Oscar in 1986, the Academy’s nod to a career full of competitive losses and he won the competitive best actor prize the very next year for “The Color of Money.” And the film that finally handed Newman his statuette happened alongside his then 24-year-old co-star Tom Cruise.
“Digger” is Cruise refusing to let his own chapter close. A consensus crowd-pleaser would have made the narrative easy. Instead, Cruise has made something that people will be talking about (good and bad).
The performance has to survive the argument to matter. If it does, the story will write itself. If it doesn’t, the honorary award will look like the right way to recognize the career at exactly the right moment.
The question “Digger” raises is whether it reads as dramatic rather than physical. He has spent years as the safest bet an audience can place. If you put Tom Cruise in the movie, he’ll deliver. But now he’s asking voters to take a different kind of chance on him.
The question was never whether Tom Cruise deserves to be celebrated. He already is. The question is whether, after years of embodying movie stardom, he can make voters look past the symbol and see the actor again. So what does an Oscar season look like with the last movie star still chasing the one prize that has eluded him? It looks complicated.