John Goodman has taken a dig at the critical response to Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Digger in a new interview.
Digger, an ultra-dark satire of climate change released to polarised reviews and pulled in just US$20 million globally on opening weekend, against a reported budget of US$140-180 million.
Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Goodman said he felt the critical response to the film ‘kind of killed us before we even opened’.
‘Maybe I am getting old and pathetic, and it’s like, “Don’t hit me again!’”‘ he told host Josh Horowitz of the bruising reviews. ‘I put so much into this film, and here you go. I am over it now. I am proud I did it.’
Diggers’ bad reviews – quick links
Can Digger viewers learn to love the bomb?
Digger has rapidly come to be considered a film that viewers will either love or hate, with little in between.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film boasts a 53% critics’ score. With a 77% audience score, punters seem to have enjoyed it quite a bit more, though not enough of them to raise the film’s hopes of clawing back its budget in theatres.
The film wasn’t helped by a marketing campaign that tied itself in knots to bury the film’s major twist. It was so cautious about spoilers that pre-release chatter became about whether the film was secretly a musical (it isn’t).
Indeed, its poor box office performance places Digger on the precipice of joining a rather special club – that of films like Ishtar and John Carter, films that took big, expensive, creative swings but became enormous bombs all the same.
Regardless of how the critics felt about Digger, Goodman’s belief is that time will ultimately tell.
‘I am proud of it,’ said Goodman, who played the cancer-ridden President Compson. ‘I had a ball doing it. It was a good six months out of my life. It is a huge swing. It’s going to be around for a long time.’
Watch the trailer
Are the critics out of touch?
Goodman has not been alone in his defence of the film, though he is one of the only members of the Digger cast to speak up about it.
Its failure to launch prompted a wave of online support from various Hollywood stars, who begged audiences to give Digger a chance.
Anne Hathaway posted a glowing review of the film to her Letterboxd account. Mandy Patinkin took to Instagram to voice his adoration, calling it ‘one of the greatest pieces of film I’ve ever seen in my life’.
Ben Affleck had strong words for people celebrating the film’s failure. ‘Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever,’ he said in an interview that, interestingly, also happened on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
‘To me, I just think, like, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of shitty, homogenised movies,’ he explained. ‘You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing, and that means you’re going to sometimes look bad.’
In the wake of the Digger discourse, a second gap between critics and filmmakers has opened. Director Taika Waititi spent the weekend putting critics on blast for panning his new film Klara And The Sun.
He took to social media to express his displeasure at the reviews, saying critics were ‘sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics. The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit.
‘Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin,’ he finished.
Waititi’s film Jojo Rabbit has an 81% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and is certified ‘fresh’, so it’s unclear who Waititi was referring to there.
