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What a strange movie Vanilla Sky is, not just from Tom Cruise, who normally doesn’t star in things so daringly outrageous, but from Cameron Crowe, who frequently works best as a writer-director of character-focused stories that highlight a transition period in the main character’s life. So here we have the makers of Jerry Maguire, a perfectly fine and serviceable romantic comedy, getting their creative hands on a remake of a Spanish language art-house feature. Moreover, I really enjoyed it.
Based on Abre Los Ojos, Vanilla Sky practically deconstructs the “Tom Cruise” image and affords him a chance to give a truly original performance. He meets the task with great aplomb, which truly surprised me. I have long regarded Cruise as a movie star, granted he’s a great one, but a limited actor, frequently given to scowling and looking intense in place of creating a real character. There have been some exceptions: I adore Legend, I think his work in Interview with the Vampire is great, and he’s never been better than he was in Born on the Fourth of July. So I didn’t walk into with Vanilla Sky with a lot of expectations about what was in store.
Color me happily surprised when what emerged was a film in which Cruise plays a playboy with more money, fame and toys than God, and these don’t even begin to satiate his need to consume and conquer more. After an accident disfigures his face, this God-like rich boy is brought down to the mortal plane and forced to face the ways in which he discarded and used people. It is once he awakens from this turmoil and tries to pick his life back up that unexplainable events begin to happen. Did he have something to do with a former lover’s death? Is he truly the master/author of his life, or is someone else pulling the strings behind the scenes?
I can’t begin to summarize the plot in a limited space, nor all of the twists that it takes on, but I will say that it ends up going to daringly obscure places that I didn’t think it would when it began. But the heavy symbolism did strike me as odd. This rich, spoiled man truly found his life recreating album covers and scenes from movies? How saturated colors are in various scenes, in retrospect, seem to answer these questions. And while Crowe is clearing going for a level of David Lynch-like weirdness, he, unlike Lynch, actually feels like he needs to answer every question and explain every strange twist and turn. I believe if some of it was left up to our imaginations that Vanilla Sky would have emerged a better film.
But Crowe was smart enough to think outside-of-the-box and ensemble a strange cast of actors who we wouldn’t immediately think of for these roles. I’ve already mentioned Cruise who begins the film as the movie star we think he is, and ends up a paranoid man who has dismantled that perception with several small choices that are very smart. Supporting him as the two romantic leads are Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz, carried over from the Spanish original. At this time Cruz was relatively unknown in to American moviegoers, and her sexy, quiet work here is quite lovely. She manages to deliver some very oddball lines with sincerity and depth, I’m thinking of the one where she tells him that they’ll meet in their next life as cats. This more sane, rational character stands in stark contrast to more obsessive and unstable ones she’s famous for (Vicky Christina Barcelona, Nine).
But the true acting revelation amongst the supporting players is Diaz, getting in touch with her inner Fatal Attraction and creating a sympathetic, deranged yet poignant character in the end. She’s sexy, vivacious, neurotic and dangerous with equal measure, making each twist and turn believable and it made me wonder why she delivers a truly great performance only once every few years. Other supporting roles are taken up by actors who are always interesting in any project that they do. Kurt Russell, Noah Taylor, Timothy Spall, Tilda Swinton, Alicia Witt, Michael Shannon all create a unique cacophony of voices that work in tandem with the general strangeness of the film as a whole.
You’ll notice that throughout I have mentioned that Vanilla Sky is odd, and described it with a variety of synonyms. Perhaps the best word for it is: hallucinatory. Or maybe love-it-or-hate-it could work even better. It doesn’t matter to me which camp you fall into, because I think we can agree on one thing as we discuss a film like this. It’s hard to shake the overall impression and numerous images long after you have watched it. And I think that for that reason alone, Vanilla Sky is worthy of a recommendation and a mention as something truly special. However you take the word special though, is entirely up to you, since we all know which category I have fallen in.
