Vanilla Sky (2001)

romantic mystery
directed by : Cameron Crowe
featuring : Tom Cruise - Penelope Cruz - Cameron Diaz - Jason Lee - Kurt Russell
running time : 2 hours 14 minutes
A remake of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes (1997), this thriller from director Cameron Crowe bears one of several discarded titles for his previous, Oscar-winning film Almost Famous (2000). Tom Cruise stars as David Ames, a womanizing playboy who finds romantic redemption when he falls in love with his best friend's girlfriend Sofia (Penelope Cruz). Before that relationship can begin, however, David is coaxed into a car driven by an ex-lover, Julie (Cameron Diaz), who turns out to be suicidal. Driving her car off a bridge, Julie kills herself and horribly disfigures David. Reconstructive surgery and the loving support of Sofia seem to reverse David's luck, but eerie incidents are soon making him question the reality of his existence and his control over his life, even while he is suspected of complicity in Julie's death. Vanilla Sky bears the expected Crowe trademark of an obsession with recent pop culture and particularly rock music, a more important element of the remake than the original film. That project's writer/director, Alejandro Amenabar, crafted his own supernatural hit the same year with The Others (2001), starring Nicole Kidman, the soon-to-be-ex-wife of Cruise.

In the same year as Steven Spielberg's love-it-or-hate-it A.I., Crowe also polarized audiences with this thought provoking, frustrating, and above-all ambitious mosaic on the states of being and perception. Vanilla Sky is one of those cinematic pretzels that ties a critic into knots, because the torrent of deconstructive theorizing it encourages would reveal key surprises. What can be divulged is that Crowe departs, for the first time in his career, from the realistic, sentimental storytelling that has interested him, switching over to existentialism as easily as if he were David Lynch. The difference here is that Crowe holds himself accountable to providing answers something Lynch has considered beneath him. A script's worth of dreamy fragments and elliptical time lines resolve themselves in a manner that most viewers should grasp. Whether they will curse or cheer Crowe for what he decides to keep withheld is up to the individual. Cruise's evident comfort working with his Jerry Maguire director results in a daring performance that can be as unsettling to watch as his most wrenching scenes in Born On The Fourth Of July. Disfigured in an accident, his David Aames must interact with the world stripped of his beauty, left to contemplate the arrogant nonchalance with which he manhandled people. Cruz continues making strides as an actress, and Diaz exudes an intense combination of sadness and rage that earned her a variety of acting citations. Whether viewers emerge feeling gypped or gripped, they're likely to carry Vanilla Sky around with them for awhile an increasingly rare attribute worth applauding.