VANILLA SKY
© 2001 Paramount Pictures

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VANILLA SKY

Based on Alejandro Amenabar's well-regarded ABRE LOS OJOS (OPEN YOUR EYES), VANILLA SKY is a tale in which a successful man's life goes into a strange form of freefall after he makes a couple of ill-advised romantic moves. Here's the set-up: David Aames (Tom Cruise) would seem to have it all. He's rich, he owns controlling shares in a powerful New York publishing house and he's got gorgeous women for the asking. We know something has gone dreadfully wrong, though, since we see David, wearing a latex mask and held in prison on murder charges, being interviewed by a psychologist (Kurt Russell).

David's current straits seem to have something to do with Julie (Cameron Diaz), someone he considers a pal and occasional sex partner, and Sofia (Penelope Cruz), the erstwhile new girlfriend of David's best bud Brian (Jason Lee). Even after some high-energy sex, David declines to invite Julie to his birthday party, but she shows anyway, becoming increasingly stressed as he deliberately flirts with Sofia. David winds up spending the night just talking with Sofia, but comes out of her building to find Julie waiting in her car for him. Julie persuades David to get in and they go for a drive that ends badly. Thereafter, David's perceptions begin to grow a little peculiar and he's already had a strangely realistic dream.

What works

Cruz and Cruise in VANILLA SKY

© 2001 Paramount Pictures

However, the movie turns out to have a whole lot more on its mind and it doesn't handle its core premise very well. We wind up trying to guess which other film or films VANILLA SKY will turn out to emulate it turns out not to be a yuppie version of JACOB'S LADDER, though viewers will be forgiven for making this guess due to the way the eventual clues are laid out.

There is ultimately a significant sharing of story elements with several major features of the '90s, but this wouldn't be so bad if we felt more engaged with the matters at hand. We understand that Crowe and Cruise are trying to make David morally ambivalent, but instead of prompting a love/hate response, we are neither driven to care enough to hope for his redemption or dislike him enough to want him punished beyond his cocksure ease when he's doing well and his general misery when he's down, David isn't a very distinctive character. He is given a lot of pop culture props that don't have enormous bearing on his personality, including a painting that gives the film its title (okay, David likes pretty environments understandable, but not exactly a unique trait). Oddly, neither David nor the movie seem to notice he's wearing something that looks a whole lot like Michael Myers' mask from HALLOWEEN the filmmakers drop the ball on the one pop icon item they include that actually has some significance to their hero.

VANILLA SKY has some good insights into why even those seemingly on top of the world sometimes detonate their relationships and succeeds in getting us to wonder what's going on. It even turns out to play fair by its own rules, something that cannot be said for all movies in the subgenre this film occupies. What VANILLA SKY doesn't do is engage us emotionally or pose any intellectual challenges that we haven't experienced elsewhere.