PARIS: Tom Cruise is taking on one of his riskiest roles in decades, tackling the politics of climate change and corporate greed in the new film Digger, in which he plays an embattled, ageing tycoon.
Backed by a reported budget of $130 million and an advertising blitz, the dark comedy from multi-Oscar-winning Mexican auteur Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu hits screens from Wednesday.
Taking a break from his usual action-movie roles, Cruise is barely recognisable as a mining and oil magnate facing an environmental crisis, with the original screenplay seeing him wrestle with his own conscience and critics of his wealth and business.
“It is the culmination of all my skills,” Cruise, 64, told GQ magazine earlier this month. “It’s the most challenging character ever.”
After the premiere in London on September 22, initial reaction online was mixed, suggesting the melodramatic performances and Inarritu’s acerbic parody of the billionaire class and climate-change campaigning will divide audiences.
An embargo on critics’ reviews lifts later Tuesday at 1600 GMT.
‘Serious’ role
Cruise has spent most of this century making action films, above all as Ethan Hunt in the eight-film Mission: Impossible series, as well as in the Top Gun sequel Top Gun: Maverick and the Jack Reacher films.
He will appear in another sequel, a follow-up to Days of Thunder, later this year.
For film critic and author A.S. Hamrah, who has written extensively about Cruise’s body of work, the last roles that harnessed the full range of his skills date back to the 1990s.
“I think Tom Cruise is looking back on his career and realising he’s ageing and that, on the one hand, he still has to do things like ‘Top Gun II’ and ‘Days of Thunder II’, but on the other he hasn’t really been in any serious film since 1999,” he told AFP.
That was the year of Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, in which Cruise acted opposite Nicole Kidman, his ex-wife.
“I also think he’s probably thinking now that there are people he has not worked with that he would like to work with, and probably Inarritu is one of them,” Hamrah added, referring to the acclaimed director of Amores Perros and The Revenant.
Awards season player?
Shawn Robbins, the founder of US-based cinema consultancy Box Office Theory, told AFP that Cruise’s decades in Hollywood demonstrated he is willing to step outside his comfort zone at times.
“Younger audiences may associate him with being a risky stunt performer and actor, but he’s always prepared to go outside the box,” he said, referring to his roles in films such as Vanilla Sky (2001) and Jerry Maguire (1996).
“We have to put Digger in a separate category from the typical Tom Cruise blockbuster. It’s something all of its own,” he added.
One interesting question is the extent to which Cruise may personally embrace the political messages of Digger: about our unsustainable lifestyles, virtue-signalling consumer behaviour and hypocritical politicians.
“I think that, like Leonardo DiCaprio, I think he’s concerned about climate change and the environment,” Hamrah, author of Last Week in End Times Cinema and a critic at n+1 magazine, told AFP.
Might it also be a role that gives Cruise a shot at an elusive Oscar for best actor?
“It could be an awards season player,” Robbins said.
