Vanilla Sky |
![]() Open your eyes! Diaz and Cruise have a domestic squabble. | |||
dir-scr Cameron Crowe with Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Kurt Russell, Jason Lee, Noah Taylor, Timothy Spall, Tilda Swinton, Johnny Galecki, Alicia Witt, Michael Shannon, Delaina Mitchell release US 14.Dec.01; UK 25.Jan.02 Paramount 01/US 2h15 ![]() | ||||
![]() David Aames (Cruise) is heir to a publishing empire, the golden boy living the Manhattan high life with a casual girlfriend (Diaz), his loyal best buddy (Lee) and more money than God. When he meets the beguiling Sofia (Cruz), he starts rethinking his priorities. But a car crash changes everything, and he turns to a psychologist (Russell) to try to sort out the unravelling threads of his identity. As the story gets darker and heavier, the film really grabs hold in a powerful way, as long as we can let ourselves be carried along until the complex conclusion. Characters flit in and out of the story, filling in gaps and adding texture while Cruise holds things together with an edgy central performance that begins to undermine his superstar image (but not quite). It's all very introspective and thought-provoking, and in the end it leaves us thoroughly shaken, contemplating issues of identity and ambition. Intriguing stuff. Strangely, the film seems bloated and under-edited. It's like we're watching Crowe's first rough cut; it's badly in need of a judicious edit, cutting about a half hour of repetitive, slightly preachy material to leave things more lean and thoughtful. Which brings us back to Abre los Ojos....
| ||||
![]() ![]() "I've seen Vanilla Sky twice and really enjoyed it. I'd previously seen Open Your Eyes at least four times and so I was expecting to detest Vanilla Sky, but Crowe maintained the strongest assets of Open Your Eyes -- the script and Penelope Cruz -- so all is not lost. In fact, I think I like it as much as Open Your Eyes now, the more I think about it. It's kind of like a cover song where you're faithful to the original and would never say that the cover is better than the original but at the same time there's something refreshing about it that makes you like it equally...." --Mike McCarthy, Boston 9.Jan.02
"I was hoping that with such a cast the production would be one of exceptional calibre. I more or less enjoyed it, until I realised it was one of those movies that you watch and grow to hate gradually afterwards as you think about it a bit, as everything sinks and settles into your mind. The storyline is one that I found very good, very unusual in a way, but also one that was completely spoilt by Cruise. Not being a fan of Cruise at all, I found once again what I think is an overrated actor, failing to perform or make us forget the actor underneath the character. Surprisingly enough, emphasis was put on two young women literally dying from love for Cruise, putting him right in the centre for reasons that are too much recurrent in films his films: he's the so passe successful, handsome, has-it-all yuppy! Then once disfigured, spending way too much time in front of the mirror. It seemed to me that, from a storyline which appealed to me as being one of a quest for getting one's life back and so on, maybe a punitive plight for the purification of an over-confident character. Cruise managed to give me the one and only feeling that this film was solely about his own vanity, about the megalomania of an actor that cannot get over his own self. These few lines are certainly very harsh and contestable, but the bottom line what Vanilla Sky represents for me is unfortunately that too often only names make a film." --Bertrand Abadie, London 30.Jan.02 | ||||
|