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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz and -- gasp! -- Cameron Crowe dump the first massive lump of Christmas coal.
Dec 14, 2001 | There are so many travesties in "Vanilla Sky" that it's almost impossible to list them in the order of their infamy. There's the shot in which Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, two slick Beautiful People who, with their resources pooled, scrounge up enough depth to fill a shot glass halfway, reprise the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." Then a scene in which a bloodless 3-D specter of John Coltrane, brought to life by the miracle of holography, entertains a group of chattering, blasi partygoers who ignore him as if he's the hired help or, worse, amuse themselves by passing their hands through him. Or, inexplicably, the fact that Tom Cruise's character has little interest in his lively, if crazy, sometime gal pal Cameron Diaz, and instead gravitates toward pinheaded munchkin Penelope Cruz, with her rubberized lips and "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" hair. She thinks she's Sophia Loren's Mini-Me.
Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as "Vanilla Sky" in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right. His two most perfect movies, "Say Anything ... " and "Almost Famous" -- the first released in 1989 and the second just last year -- already have the vivid resonance of favorite pop albums, replete with snaps and crackles that many of us have come to know by heart. Even in "Jerry Maguire," Crowe's biggest hit and his most obvious mainstream vehicle, he understands the way pop vernacular links us to something universal and tender. Of all directors working today, Crowe is most finely attuned to the galloping heartbeat of pop culture; he's alert to its loudest, most vital thumps, but he's more interested in listening around them, to pick up the quieter hiccups and murmurs and thrumming that, in the end, mean everything.
If "Vanilla Sky" were completely tone-deaf, we could just check it off as an anomaly and move on. But the disheartening truth is that we can see Crowe taking all the right steps, the most Crowe-like steps, as he mounts a spectacle that overshoots boldness and ambition and idiosyncrasy and heads right for arrogance and pretension -- and those last two are traits I never would have thought we'd have to ascribe to Crowe. In "Vanilla Sky" -- a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's "Abre los ojos" ("Open Your Eyes"), which also featured Cruz -- Tom Cruise is a young publishing hotshot who, like a bumblebee in Helmut Lang, flits from flower to flower, never landing long enough to fall in love.
Cameron Diaz is the friend with whom he often casually shares a bed; she acts as if she can handle the nebulous terms of their relationship, but it quickly becomes clear that her sunny heart harbors an obsession blacker than Cruise's clothes. Her unhinged adoration causes an accident in which Cruise is horribly disfigured -- but not before he falls madly for the woman his best buddy (Jason Lee, a sharp, appealing actor who, this time around, is all dressed down with no place to go) has a crush on. The dancer-artist prancer-vixen is played with unnervingly perky self-assurance by the dreaded Cruz. As if that weren't enough punishment, Cruise also manages to land himself in prison. There he broods mightily, a tragic figure behind a latex Phantom of the Opera mask, resisting the efforts of his daddy-shrink (Kurt Russell, delivering an even-toned performance in a thankless role) to help him.
"Vanilla Sky"
Directed by Cameron Crowe
Starring Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz
Although it sounds as if I've given the whole thing away, that's not even one-tenth of this aggressively plotted puzzle picture, which clutches many allegedly deep themes to its heaving bosom without uncovering even an onionskin layer of insight into any of them. Dreams, desires, fear of death, gravitation toward beauty for its own sake, the way we all yearn to be people we're not -- those are just a few of the tadpoles squirming around in Crowe's primordial po-mo murk.
