Overall Rating
  Awesome: 29.17%
Worth A Look: 25.96%
Average: 20.83%
Pretty Bad: 14.1%
Total Crap: 9.94%
16 reviews, 216 user ratings
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| Vanilla Sky |
by Erik Childress
"Open Your Eyes Wide Shut"
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Remember “Eyes Wide Shut”? Remember audience’s reaction to it back when it first opened and how the cinematic majority unfairly maligned it? At least, that’s my perception of it considering that it graced my top ten list in 1999. I’ve argued the merits of Kubrick’s film up and down, but even today I watch faces clench up when those three syllables are uttered as if someone got a hold of an old lemon covered in bodily fluids. Well you can toss those old fruits aside like Rip Taylor because everyone will have something new to suck on when they see Vanilla Sky, a film, while not a disaster, is one destined to have the same reputation.“Forget everything you know about Love, Hate, Dreams, Life, Work, Play, Friendship and Sex.” That’s what the film’s tagline tells us. Forget everything you know period would be a better one since the pill we are expected to swallow through the course of the film is more jagged than a knife wearing a spiked dog collar. But I’m getting ahead of myself since the filmmakers obviously want as little revealed as possible (unless you’re Peter Travers from Rolling Stone.)
Tom Cruise stars as, well, Tom Cruise. Actually he plays David Aames; one of those hotshot magazine publishers we see in the movies played all the time by hot hotshot actors. This one though inherited the company after his father’s death and is looked down upon by the board of directors known as the “seven dwarfs.” (No, they have nothing to do with Disney or cigarette companies.)
David has just made a “F*&! Buddy” out of friend Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz). Four times in one night and swallowing will do that to you. David, however, isn’t exactly interested in the further advances of Julie, which basically include wanting to just talk to him and showing up (uninvited) to his birthday party wearing nothing but a bedspread. The nerve of some women, huh?
Also showing up to the party are David’s best friend Brian Shelby (the irreplaceable Jason Lee) and his new lady Sofia Serrano (the please-replace-her-now Penelope Cruz). Brian’s such a good friend that he doesn’t seem to mind that David takes an instant attraction to Sofia and proceeds to spend all his party time chasing her around trying to avoid the suspicious gazing of Julie and the “what’s mine is yours” attitude of Brian.
Everything seems very “Jerry Maguire-ish” in David’s immediate courtship of Sofia, being a “pleasure delayer” and all. That is until Julie spots David leaving Sofia’s apartment the next morning and in a fit of rage and jealousy, drives the two of them off the road in a spectacular car wreck. This is where the “less is more” approach in reviewing would be advised and is evidently the same approach used in the script. The less you’re told makes for more surprises, even though the more we’re eventually told makes for less credibility and even less of an overall theme.
It’s not giving away government secrets to say that one of those central themes is “dreams and appearance vs. reality.” From the opening sequence in which David awakens to an empty Times Square to the constant “dream within a dream” moments, one has to be on their toes to remember what they’ve just seen and how it relates to other scenes which may not have been real to begin with anyway. Who’s alive and who’s dead? Who’s sleeping and who’s awake? Who’s real and who’s not? In retrospect, the only piece of reality may actually be the final shot of the film.
One of Vanilla Sky’s major problems is its final act where all the loose ends and questions we may have are brought together simply to leave us with more questions than we had going in. In an effort to describe this resolution and still maintain an avoidance of full disclosure, imagine watching Tootsie for 100 minutes and then finding out that Dustin Hoffman was really an alien.
Described as a “pop culture thrill ride” by Cruise himself on the interview circuit, it’s a definition that doesn’t quite make sense until the explanation phase in a moment of clarity that would even make alcoholics go “oh cool, I get it.” But we’re still never played quite fair with. Connections can be made, but the hints that are crucial to tying everything together aren’t all there. It’s one thing if we knew Tootsie was a film about aliens, or that the possibility of aliens was suggested and existed in the reality of the film. Then again, this film rarely deals in reality. Savvy cinephiles wanting to hop on that pop culture thrill ride may want to take a second look at that “Jules and Jim” poster decorating Cruise’s wall in the film. It may hold the key to the entire film.
This is a remake of the 1997 Spanish thriller "Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes).” Cruise bought the rights to redux it from writer/director Alejandro Amenábar. As a present, he produced his first American feature, “The Others” and got his (then) wife Nicole Kidman to star in it. It’s easy for some to label this as nothing more than a big vanity project for Cruise. Scientology issues notwithstanding, there’s something to be said for Gen-X guilt about a film where “casual sex” is the enemy for a handsome, successful character and all the easy answers can come in settling down with that one special somebody. At times, single people may feel like they’re being preached to by a bunch of married people, twice-divorcees and those who live with Goldie Hawn for decades. If the film wasn’t as well made as it is, it could have quickly be deemed as Cruise’s “The Postman.”
For all the things that I believe to be wrong with Vanilla Sky, there is a lot to grasp onto in the praise column. Cruise’s performance is nothing short of terrific and quite fearless as he is called on to be quite unlikable throughout large portions of the film. He is supported through a great ensemble, most notably Cameron Diaz, so good as the sexy, nutty and occasionally sympathetic current/former lover. Kurt Russell does solid work as Cruise’s psychiatrist, trying to cut through the mystery of his client. Jason Lee is as fun to watch as ever and Penelope Cruz is, well, see earlier comments.
The film was adapted and directed by the great Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) who has made a career creating the kind of wonderful, bittersweet character-influenced comedies of the likes of James L. Brooks and his mentor, the legendary Billy Wilder. Crowe may have wanted to take a shot at branching out into the various kinds of work that Wilder was famous for (after all he was responsible for Some Like It Hot, The Apartment AND Double Indemnity) and even his Kubrick-ian final credits suggest loftier aspirations. While he clearly here shows he can pace a thriller and keep us intrigued for over two hours, his loyalty to Amenábar’s original source material may have been his downfall.Both Memento and even David Lynch’s overrated Mulholland Drive were far more successful in dealing with similar issues and late plot twists. With a final act that flirts the thin line between being profound or laughable, Crowe should have worked a little more on the holes that would erase that line and to make the themes of the first two acts more penetrating. Casual sex vs. monogamy and the way people react to outer beauty without the inner and vice versa should be prime fodder for a filmmaker as talented as Crowe and this Sky could certainly have used a few sprinkles and a little chocolate syrup. At least, that’s my perception of it.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4641&reviewer=198
originally posted: 12/14/01 11:07:27
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USA
14-Dec-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Dec-2001 (MA)
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