It Took Tom Cruise 40 Years to Become Digger Rockwell

The Digger trailer dropped this morning and I have watched it enough times that I should probably be worried about myself, because Tom Cruise — the last actual movie star, the man who has spent forty years running full-speed toward the camera so you would never have to doubt it was really him — has handed his entire body over to Alejandro G. Iñárritu to play a fat, balding, Southern oil baron who may have just started the end of the world. And the thing that undoes me is the line Cruise reportedly said about it: “It took me forty years to become this character.” Read that again. The most controlled man in movies is telling you the transformation was the whole career.

You have to understand what a violence this is against the brand. Cruise is the guy who does not use a stunt double, who hung off the plane, who broke his ankle and finished the shot, who turned Mission: Impossible into a decades-long argument that a human being can still be more astonishing than a rendered one. The Cruise gift is competence. Control. A hero who always, always has it handled. That is the promise on the ticket. And here he is as Digger Rockwell, “the most powerful man in the world,” pot belly and thinning white hair and an accent, playing a man whose defining trait appears to be that he does not have it handled at all — that his hands on the wheel are exactly the problem.

And of course it is Iñárritu. Of course it is. This is the director’s first English-language film since The Revenant, the movie that dragged Leonardo DiCaprio through a frozen river until it produced an Oscar and a thousand stories about how miserable the shoot was. Iñárritu does not do comfortable. He does not do movie-star vanity. He is the one filmmaker alive whose whole method is to strip an actor down to something they did not know was in there and refuse to call cut until it comes out. Point that at the most guarded star in the world and you get this: the trailer where you are, genuinely, not sure it is him.

The move that tells you they know exactly what they are doing is the montage. Cruise fronts the whole thing with his own iconography — the runs, the grins, the stunts, forty years of the most recognizable face in the medium — and then dissolves it into Digger. That is not nostalgia. That is the thesis. You have to show the reader the movie star at full wattage so that the erasure of the movie star actually costs something. They are spending the most valuable brand in Hollywood to watch it disappear on purpose.

It could be a disaster. “A comedy of catastrophic proportions” is a phrase that can cut both ways, and Iñárritu’s sense of humor has historically been the driest thing in whatever room he is standing in. A satirical black comedy about an oil billionaire and a maybe-nuclear ecological catastrophe could tip into smug, into lecture, into the kind of Important Film that mistakes its own frown for depth. But I do not care, and I mean that. Because the swing is the story. A star who never has to do this, doing the one thing his entire persona is built to never do, with the one director most likely to actually break him open. That is the most interesting thing Tom Cruise has done in twenty years and the movie is not even out until October.

So tell me honestly: are you more excited to watch Tom Cruise do the impossible stunt, or to watch him finally let a great director take the stunt away?