Warner Bros has just paid critics and influencers the greatest compliment imaginable. You might reasonably expect the media giant to be a tad peeved at the mixed word on Alejandro G Iñárritu’s film Digger.
The sprawling satire, starring a heavily made-up Tom Cruise as a deranged oil magnate, once looked like one of the company’s big Oscar players. Anything could still happen. Cruise may well get a best-actor nomination in honour of his status as the Last Movie Star.
But the advance eye-rolling will not have helped. Mike Ryan called the film “unpleasant” and “baffling” on X. His fellow critic Hoai-Tran Bui referred to it as insufferable.
Why single out these comments? Because they appear in a new advertisement for the film. The canny little video begins with a quote from one @thejonathansim: “Digger is an ambitious film sure to polarize audiences.”
Two thumbs up for Tom Cruise in Digger. Also, two thumbs down
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We then cut to Cruise’s title character spitting, “You know what? F**k those people!” There follows a series of juxtapositions between apparently negative and positive one-word reviews: “Masterpiece” vs “Unpleasant”. “Baffling” vs “Brilliant”. And so on.
We see footage from the film’s centrepiece, in which furious politicians, beneath the legend “Same film different truth”, yell dissent while Digger holds the parliamentary floor. “They’re afraid to tell the truth – whatever that is,” he remarks closing a door on the viewer.
Fair enough. The film’s distributor is noting there is much disagreement about the movie and inviting potential attendees to decide for themselves (as they always should).
[ Digger review: Tom Cruise can’t be faulted for effort. But it’s still wastedOpens in new window ]
In truth, the brief negative notices flit by so quickly one can barely take them in. Those with healthy cinematic knowledge will think back to all those masterpieces that emerged to early disdain: The Thing, The Shining, Withnail and I.
Will Digger also end up acclaimed a masterpiece? This critic is saying it won’t, but, yes, you really should decide for yourself.
Anyway, Digger joins a shortish list of titles that have dared to use negative notices in their publicity. Among the most notable examples is David Lynch’s Lost Highway, from 1997. The characteristically surreal noir emerged to largely positive reviews, but Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, then the most powerful critics in the United States, were less than impressed.
“It’s a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences,” Ebert wrote. “There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point.” He and Siskel offered their notorious “two thumbs down” to the picture on their television show.
Lynch (or his people) leaned into the negativity. A poster later appeared with the words “Two Thumbs Down – Siskel and Ebert” sitting above the legend “Two more great reasons to see ... Lost Highway”.
The advertisement could, to continue with the digital analogies, be read as two fingers up to the school of mainstream white-bread criticism that Siskel and Ebert seemed to exemplify.
This is not entirely fair. Both men were more open to challenging material than is now remembered. Though Ebert was unconvinced by Lynch’s work until the arrival of The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, in the millennial years, Siskel pushed back with enthusiastic reviews of earlier films such as Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart.
For all that, this felt like a win for Lynch.
The marketing team behind Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, from 2017, created a poster that placed an array of positive notices down one side and negative reviews down the other. “A circus of grotesque debauchery,” Rex Reed didn’t exactly rave in The Observer. “Some people are going to f@#ing hate this movie,” Scott Maslow equivocated in GQ.
There is a linking theme. All of these films are, in their different ways, deliberately provocative. Core audiences for this version of Aronofsky, this version of Lynch and this version of Iñárritu fully expect their idols’ films to enrage the unconvinced. (See also the Lars von Trier tendency.) That is part of the appeal.
If you see a distributor displaying negative reviews of its romantic comedy or high-end literary adaptation then the word “brave” really can be used with confidence.
To my knowledge, no advertisements for the much-derided 2022 take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the one with Dakota Johnson, dragged out any of the critical brickbats.
“It appears to have lifted sentences from the novel and fed them through some kind of Instagram-filtering, catchphrase-generating, text-summarizing idiot bot,” Justin Chang wrote in the Los Angeles Times – but not on any poster.
The real winners in the current case are, however, the most underappreciated and misused class in world media. I speak, naturally, of film critics.
For all the dry snark in that Digger promo, its focus on reviewers confirms that we brave folk do still matter. A bit. In certain contexts. For now.
