Vanilla Sky
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Written by: Cameron Crowe (screenplay), Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil
Starring: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, Jason Lee

Cameron and Cameron? Cruise and Cruz? This is a rather strange coincidence, to be sure, and on the surface, Vanilla Sky might be seen as a rather strange movie. The thing is, when you sit down and peel back all the thick layers of imagery, the remaining core of the film is only as strange as you want it to be.

It is difficult to summarize the plot of Vanilla Sky without spoiling some surprises, so I will simply provide a vague overview. One thing I should mention up front: I can almost guarantee that the movie is not what you think it is.

Based on Alejandro Amenabar’s Spanish film “Abre Los Ojos” (Open Your Eyes), the film is billed as an “erotic thriller”, and yet sets itself up in the early stages as a modernized retelling of Citizen Kane. Tom Cruise plays David Aames, a spoiled rich kid who is left to run his father’s successful magazine after his parents die in an accident. Cruise is, of course, the perfect guy to play this role, full of charisma and an air of arrogance. His flawless good looks also serve to make a specific event later in the movie much more poignant and dramatic.

David has everything a guy could ask for, including a casual sex relationship with an attractive woman named Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz). However, when David is introduced to Sofia (Penelope Cruz) by his best friend Brian (Jason Lee), he thinks he has found true love, in typical Cameron Crowe fashion. Unfortunately, Julie has become a little attached to Tommy Boy, and her jealousy leads to an extreme fit of rage that thrusts the movie into a confusing and schizophrenic journey along the line between fantasy and reality.

An analysis of this film cannot exist without discussion of the Cameron Crowe factor. Vanilla Sky is a Cameron Crowe movie. The screenplay was adapted by him, and the film was directed by him. Admittedly, the material is a bit of a departure for Crowe, who is best known for his tender, heart-warming films such as Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, and yet, his fingerprints can still be seen all over Vanilla Sky.

First let me describe what I see as the three golden rules of Cameron Crowe filmmaking, all of which are painfully evident in this movie.

1. Fill the movie with lots of witty music references and a hip soundtrack to match.

Vanilla Sky contains an endless number of trivial music and pop culture in-jokes from Crowe, who refuses to let us forget that he was a former writer for Rolling Stone magazine. The soundtrack does feature some great music, but it is eclectic and jarring. It is admirable that Crowe puts a lot of effort into the backing music for his movies, but he’s no Quentin Tarantino; the music is all over the map, with no cohesive style or purpose.

2. Pull the camera in tight on the faces of the stars as often as possible.

By now we’ve seen that Cameron Crowe is a hopeless romantic, and his movies are basically all love stories. Vanilla Sky is similarly built around a love triangle, and we are treated accordingly to many, many excruciating close-ups of Tom Cruise grinning like a jackass, and Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz batting their eyelashes at him.

3. Whenever you come up with a particularly clever line of dialogue, repeat it to emphasize its brilliance.

I have started to notice that Crowe always has a few catch phrases in his movies that are often echoed in later scenes in an attempt to sound witty or resonant. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but in Vanilla Sky he ends up spoiling some of the film’s most important moments with his goofy banter.

It is understood that most directors have a distinctive style of their own; after all they are artists in their own right, and it is their vision that ultimately controls what we see on screen. However, it is also the director’s job to find the best way to immerse us in the story, without calling attention to how the film has been made. Many of Cameron Crowe’s idiosyncracies do not seem suited to this film, and come across as self-indulgent and distracting. Vanilla Sky seems like it wants to be darker in tone than he will allow.

On the upside, Vanilla Sky is nothing if not thought provoking. If you like a jigsaw puzzle of a movie, then you may enjoy trying to piece this one together. Unfortunately, you may also be disappointed when the puzzle becomes nearly impossible to decipher, and in the end must be spelled out by the director in an overly explicit fashion.

This is my biggest complaint about Vanilla Sky. After sitting through 2 hours of challenging storytelling, the conclusion does not pay off. The picture that results from the completed puzzle is not as impressive as the individual puzzle pieces were. The explanation of the movie’s schizophrenic nature comes completely out of left field (not unlike the ridiculous ending of A.I.), and while I am a fan of science fiction, the idea seemed a little too cold and fantastical to conclude a story centering on desires and passion.

The whole concept of illusion vs. reality is a tired and cliched theme for artsy movies, and in exploring it Crowe is just asking to look ridiculous. The worst way to short change a viewer is to threaten them with the possibility that the whole thing may be just a dream. The surreal and jarring segments of the film went on for too long, leaving us disoriented. The movie was ripe full of potent imagery, but it wasn’t really connected into any sort of meaningful message or theme. The movie becomes downright laughable at its literal and symbolic climax, and the movie’s finale, which takes place on the rooftop of a skyscraper, is rather fitting because by this point the movie has climbed well over most people’s heads.

Vanilla Sky is a mainstream movie trying to be artsy, or if you like, an artsy movie trying to be mainstream. In the end, it doesn’t achieve the goals of either.

As strange and different as the movie tries to be, it does not end up feeling original in the least. Countless other movies/stories were called to mind during the course of Vanilla Sky, including (but not limited to) Total Recall, The Game, The Matrix, Eyes Wide Shut, American Psycho, Citizen Kane, A.I., Fight Club, Phantom Of The Opera, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.

My appreciation of the movie might well be improved through a second viewing, but I just can’t convince myself that it will be anymore rewarding a second time through. Mostly I am now curious as to how the original movie played out. I suspect that it is a much more fully realized film, making Vanilla Sky nothing more than an unnecessary and inferior knockoff of a foreign film, catering to the anti-subtitle audience. Well nuts to that, and nuts to Vanilla Sky. — Sean