Vanilla Sky

Released 2001
Stars Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Noah Taylor, Tilda Swinton
Directed by Cameron Crowe

"Vanilla Sky," like the 2001 pictures "Memento" and "Mulholland Drive" before it, requires the audience to do some heavy lifting. It has one of those plots that doubles back on itself like an Escher staircase. You get along splendidly one step at a time, but when you get to the top floor you find yourself on the bottom landing. If it's any consolation, its hero is as baffled as we are; it's not that he has memory loss, like the hero of "Memento," but that in a certain sense he may have no real memory at all.

Cruise stars as David Aames, a 33-year-old tycoon who inherited a publishing empire when his parents were killed in a car crash. His condo is like the Sharper Image catalog died and went to heaven. He has a sex buddy named Julie (Cameron Diaz) and thinks they can sleep together and remain just friends, but as she eventually has to explain, "When you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not." At a party, he locks eyes with Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz), who arrives as the date of his friend Brian (Jason Lee) but ends up spending the night with him. Even though they don't have sex, it looks to me like their bodies are making promises to each other.

At this point the movie starts unveiling surprises which I should not reveal. A lot of surprises. Surprises on top of surprises. The movie is about these surprises, however, and so I must either end this review right now, or reveal some of them.

Summary by Roger Ebert

Why did I love Mulholland Drive but not care for "Vanilla Sky" very much? Was it because of Tom Cruise? Maybe. His smarminess is such a turn-off it makes it difficult for me to enjoy his movies. The best aspect of this flick is Tom wearing the latex mask which hides that smarminess, but unfortunately he doesn't wear it enough. Was it because the movie broke my first rule of thumb, which is that an entire movie can't be a dream? Not necessarily. Mulholland Drive was similar in that respect, but it didn't try to manipulate the audience like "Vanilla Sky." While watching "Vanilla Sky" I asked myself in every single scene is this a dream? There were even dreams within dreams, and each scene seemed independent to me. They didn't flow into a single story, so I couldn't get involved. Then there was the final (overly lengthy) explanation of what had happened, but it didn't make sense. You can't be cryogenically frozen and have brain activity. One of many reasons why this is true is that we use between 25% and 33% of our food intake to fuel our brains. If you're frozen, you would have no fuel. I don't think that really mattered, though, because I think everything we saw in the movie was actually a dream. The movie ends with the alarm clock saying "open your eyes" in one of the girls voices. Since that clock probably wouldn't be around 150 years later, I think everything except the final 3 seconds were a dream. If I remember correctly, he also woke up in bed with Julie (Cameron Diaz). Although I didn't have any emotional investment in the characters, I felt cheated. In fact, I felt more cheated watching this movie than something like "Jacob's Ladder," because this movie was grounded in reality. --Bill Alward, November 30, 2002