Tom Cruise's Best Oscar Shot Comes With a Combover
This Tuesday, September 22, Digger has its world premiere in London, and for once the most interesting thing about a Tom Cruise movie is how little of Tom Cruise you can see. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, making his first film since Bardo, has buried Tom Cruise under a pot belly, a thick Southern accent and thinning white hair in an unconvincing combover, as Variety described the trailer. He plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon billed as the most powerful man in the world, racing to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.
The cast around him is stacked: Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, a scientist working for the President, John Goodman as President Compson, Sandra Hüller as Digger's sister Emma, Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President and Jesse Plemons as Kenny. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it on 35mm film in VistaVision. It opens in the US, IMAX included, on Friday, October 2, and Wikipedia's entry calls it a satirical black comedy.
Nobody has seen it yet, so treat what follows as a bet. Ours: the best Tom Cruise is the one who lets a great director break his image, and Digger is the first time in years he has handed himself over this completely. He already holds an honorary Oscar. If any film gets him a competitive one, it is this one.
The other Tom Cruise
Everyone knows the Cruise who runs. There is a second one, and he shows up only when a director with a strong idea asks him to be ugly, cruel or ridiculous.
Oliver Stone got him first. In Born on the Fourth of July he plays the Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, and the film earned him his first Best Actor nomination. Ten years later Paul Thomas Anderson cast him in Magnolia as the motivational speaker Frank T. J. Mackey, and that role brought his third Oscar nomination, his only one in a supporting category, and a Golden Globe win. The same year, Stanley Kubrick put him opposite Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, which to our eyes is the strangest thing on his résumé and one of the best.
Then Michael Mann made him the villain. His Vincent in Collateral is cold and frightening, and the critical consensus singled out his "lean, villainous performance." In Tropic Thunder he went further, turning up as Les Grossman, and got a Golden Globe nomination for a comedy supporting turn most stars would have been too vain to try.
His other acting nomination came from Jerry Maguire, which is the hero Cruise at full wattage and a great time. But look at what the other five films have in common. In each one the director's idea is bigger than the star, and the star lets it be.
What Iñárritu brings
That is exactly the deal Iñárritu offers. His run started with Amores Perros in 2000, then 21 Grams and Babel, serious, heavy films that made his name. After that he got bolder. Birdman won Best Picture, and a year later The Revenant made Iñárritu only the third director to win Best Director two years running. Lubezki won cinematography Oscars for both.
Birdman is the key text for Digger. Iñárritu knows what to do with a famous face, and Cruise is the most famous face he could have picked. Asked why Cruise, he answered in a video message quoted by Variety: "To me, that's like asking somebody why you drink water when you are thirsty. Because it's what you need."
The idea itself goes back a decade.
Cruise being Cruise, in a fat suit
The one worry is the one fans will recognise. On the New Heights podcast, Cruise told the story of the Digger makeup chair: the prosthetics first took six hours to apply, so he brought in someone with a stopwatch and told the team, "By the time we're done, we're going to get it under an hour." Entertainment Weekly reported that he timed each piece and ran practice drills until the team got there. "I like going into a system, studying it and trying to figure out how I can do it better, more efficient," he said.
That is pure action-hero energy, and it is a little funny next to a character this far from his image. The question for Tuesday night is whether Iñárritu kept that engine running under the latex or switched it off. Everything in the Stone, Anderson and Mann films says Cruise is at his best when somebody else is driving.
The verdict
Yes, this is his real Oscar swing. Magnolia is the performance people still cite, and it was a supporting part in an ensemble. Digger is a lead in a film by a director with two Best Director wins, playing the kind of loud, damaged, self-deceiving man that got him nominated for Ron Kovic and Frank Mackey. Satire is a harder sell with voters than war drama, and the prosthetics could cut either way. But this is the right kind of risk, and he has not taken one this big in a long time.
Before Friday, October 2, give yourself the other Tom Cruise. The list below runs in the order we would watch it, ending on the two Iñárritu films that tell you what kind of movie you are walking into.
