Vanilla Sky
directed by Cameron Crowe
- Released: 2001
I steered well clear of this when I saw the trailer at the cinema. A pretty people vehicle trying to be hip and edgy? No thanks. I wasn’t aware that it was a Hollywood remake of a European original (Abre los ojos, 1997)—and let’s face it, that would hardly have been encouragement if I had known.
So when I finally, still with a vague grudge, got round to checking it out on video, my sneer appeared quickly as it opened to the strains of Radiohead. Not only was this slick young film trying to stretch its avant-pop credibility, so was this slick young character, David Aames (Tom Cruise). Still, at least since Born On The Fourth Of July, most definitely since Magnolia, Cruise has proved himself to be more than meets the eye, so I persisted…
Now, unexpected surprises are always the most potent, so this film formed a mini obsession for me in the week or two that followed seeing it for the first time. My initial cynicism turned out to be mostly a case of misplaced judgement, believing too soon that the film operated at no greater level than that of its shallow, irritatingly blasé protagonist. At the start of the film, David Aames—a brash, womanising inheritor of a massive media empire—is insufferable. If you’ve no patience for such a character, or your empathy is limited to people who "really" suffer (i.e. people without money), you’ll not go far with this film—save yourself the bother and leave it be.
The crux of the film is a savage car crash, where Aames’ on-and-off friend/lover Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz in a great performance) commits suicide in a jealous rage with him in the passenger seat. Julie dies, Aames lives on, with a disfigured arm and face, and unbearable neurological pain. My admiration for Cruise rocketed here. Nowhere in the publicity for the film had this twist been hinted at, as far as I’d seen. That poster, just Cruise’s moody face against the sky, probably lured no end of people into the film on its own. I can’t help but imagine Cruise and director Cameron Crowe delighting at the prospect, knowing how they were going to undermine such expectations.
As Aame’s relationship with archetypal dream-woman Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) progresses—after being crushed out of shape just after its initiation by the car crash—things get stranger and stranger. Reality descends into a jittery, fragmented maze of confusion as a masked Aames pores over his recent past with a therapist (Kurt Russell). Confusion between Sofia and Julie—and Sofia’s name—underline a tremendous debt to Philip K. Dick (it does seem grossly odd that Tom Cruise ends up as Dick’s biggest and best champion in Hollywood, but so be it).
The mind-bending finale may leave you feeling cheated, unless you’ve loved the rest of the film enough to swallow your pride—in which case you’ll watch it all again and feel enriched.
The Shallowness of Depth
Highly curious after seeing this captivating film, I browsed the web to find other reviews, and unsurprisingly found a great split in opinion. The unafraid-to-be-low-brow sites such as Ain’t It Cool News loved it. Most edifying, I found, were the left-of-centre mainstream reviews.
Take Salon.com. With zero sense for hidden Gnostic depths, the reviewer ridicules the scene where Sofia playfully passes her hand through a hologram of John Coltrane at a party. Even more fascinating is the reviewer’s loathing for Penélope Cruz, "with her rubberized lips and ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ hair." The thrust of it all is: this film is trying to be "deep", and it fails miserably because the two leading actors are pretty.
And over at The Guardian, we’re told that "the big deal is that Tom’s gorgeous chops are ruined in a car wreck, so he’s sobbing in front of the bathroom mirror and gazing in horror at his (not that yucky) scars and deformities." Hmmmm. Never mind the crippling pain, Tom—cheer up!
All this tells my bullshit detector that these reviewers are guilty of the very thing they despise: shallowness. That would explain their venom. Such is the condition that makes final judgements on films based on an actor’s hair and lips, or on the portrayal of vanity in a study of wounded vanity.
