Vanilla Sky is a 2001 American psychological thriller film which has been variously characterized by published film critics as "an odd mixture of science fiction, romance, and reality warp",[2] "part Beautiful People fantasy, part New Age investigation of the Great Beyond",[3] a "love story, a struggle for the soul, or an existential confrontation with the eternal",[4] and an "erotic adventure, romance, comedy, mystery, and psychological thriller, with a dose of science fiction".[5]
The film is a "very close remake"[6] of the 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes (Abre los Ojos), which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Vanilla Sky stars Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Penélope Cruz (a reprise of her performance in Abre los ojos), Jason Lee, and Kurt Russell. It was directed by Cameron Crowe, who directed Cruise in Jerry Maguire and produced this film together with Cruise, Paula Wagner, and Cruise/Wagner Productions. Though Abre los Ojos was received with much higher regard by international film critics, Vanilla Sky had a wider distribution.
Plot
David Aames recently has become owner of his deceased father's publishing company, and begins to enjoy a wealthy lifestyle. David, through his friend Brian Shelby, is introduced to Sofia Serrano, and the two begin to flirt and become closer. When David's former girlfriend, Julianna Gianni, discovers this, she becomes extremely jealous. One day, she offers David a ride, but purposely crashes her car at high speed off a bridge; Julianna dies while David survives, though his face is scarred up so badly he wears a mask to hide the embarrassment from the world so that people will not stare or look at his face. On an evening out with Brian and Sofia after the crash, David becomes extremely intoxicated, much to Sofia's displeasure, and she and Brian leave David to wallow on a sidewalk. The next morning Sofia returns to help David back onto his feet, they begin to date steadily, and David has cosmetic surgery that restores his face to its appearance before the crash.
Though David's life seems perfect, he finds oddities about it, such as a completely empty Times Square. At times, he finds himself hallucinating, his face reverting to before the plastic surgery. A strange man appears at various locations to tell David he has the power to control the world. After one hallucination episode, David goes to Sofia's apartment to find Julianna there, and that all the old photos and pictures of David and Sofia have been replaced with Julianna. In a fit of rage, David kills Julianna by suffocation. He is arrested and put into prison, placed under the psychological care of Dr. Curtis McCabe. David, finding himself suffering from a form of amnesia, attempts to recount the recent events to Dr. McCabe, and the two discover that there may be a connection between David and a company known as "Life Extension", who place clinically-dead patients into cryonic chambers to awaken in the future when cures may be available. David and Mr. McCabe visit the company, who explain that they place their patients into a "Lucid Dream" state while in the cryogenics company. David recognizes that the reality he is in is his own Lucid Dream, and calls for Tech Support.
David escapes from the company office to find the mysterious man directing him to an elevator. As they rise to the top of an impossibly tall building, the man, revealing himself to be the tech support, explains David's true past: after passing out drunk on the sidewalk, he never saw Sofia again. Due to his depression, David sought the services of Life Extension, wishing to start the Lucid Dream the morning after the drunken incident, and to live under the "vanilla sky" his mother always talked about; he then committed suicide so that he may be placed in the cryogenic system, where he has been for the past 150 years. While David was experiencing the Lucid Dream, a malfunction of the system caused the dream to become a nightmare, merging Sofia and Julianna's personas and creating people, such as Dr. McCabe, out of his past memories. At the roof of the building, the man offers David a choice, to either be reinserted into the corrected Lucid Dream as to be together with Sofia forever, or to opt to wake up though this requires a leap of faith off the building. David opts to be awakened so that he can live a real life, and he takes a few last moments to say goodbye to the Dream versions of Sofia and Brian, then jumps off the building, his memories flashing through his eyes as he falls. Just as he hits the ground, a voice tells David to wake up, the film briefly focuses on his closed eye opening onto the real world.
Cast
Interpretations
According to Cameron Crowe's commentary, there are four different interpretations of the ending:
- "Tech support" is telling the truth; 150 years have passed since David Aames killed himself, and everything after his passing out on the sidewalk was a lucid dream.
- The entire movie is a dream, as evidenced by the sticker on David's car that reads '2/30/01' (February 30 doesn't occur in the Gregorian calendar).
- The entire movie after the crash is a dream that takes place while David is in a coma.
- The entire movie is the plot to the book that Brian is writing.
The title is a reference to depictions of skies in some of the paintings of Claude Monet; Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" identifies the first Lucid Dream scene (morning reunion after club scene); all that follows is dream.
Clues:
- When Julie Gianni's cell phone rings in the opening scene the ring-tone is "row row row your boat....life is but a dream".
- Early in the movie Sofia wakes up next to David on the couch and asks David what he is watching on TV and he replies, "A great show called 'Sofia'".
- References to the Seven Dwarfs may be an obvious clue with the fate of Snow White.
- At David's birthday party, Brian's shirt has the word 'fantasy' written on it.
- The scene where Benny the Dog is on Conan the owner's shirt reads 'LE' but there is a symbol of a man in between the 'L' and 'E', which makes the shirt read LIE.
- The opening shot and the final shot frame the movie with a voice-over asking David to "open your eyes." Also, throughout the film, David is told to "wake up," and is often reminded that he is "living the dream."
- When David is being processed after his arrest, the placard around his neck for the mugshot reads, in code, "When did the dream become a nightmare?" Some of the letters are literal. Others are represented by numbers indicating their place in the alphabet.
- When David's origin in the Lucid Dream is explained by Tech Support, it shows David's tank in which he is frozen. On it is read: "David Aames" and under it are numbers and letters (Patient #). These read when decoded "Pleasant Dreams". The same numbers and letters are shown during the process of reconstruction on his face when it shows his skull during reconstruction on the computer screen.
Reception
Box office
The film opened at #1 at the box office when it was released on December 14, 2001. The opening weekend were $25,015,518 (24.9%). The final domestic grossing was $100.61m while the foreign grossing was slightly higher at $102.76m for a Worldwide grossing of $203,388,341.[8] Against the $68 million, the film was a clear financial hit.
Critical
Critical reaction was from mixed to negative. It currently holds a 39 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 157 reviews (62 positive, 95 negative).[9] Metacritic reported, based on 33 reviews, a "Mixed or Average" rating of 45 out of 100.[10]
Roger Ebert's print review gave it three out of four stars:
- Think it all the way through, and Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky is a scrupulously moral picture. It tells the story of a man who has just about everything, thinks he can have it all, is given a means to have whatever he wants, and loses it because — well, maybe because he has a conscience. Or maybe not. Maybe just because life sucks. Or maybe he only thinks it does. This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times.
Ebert said that the ending "explains the mechanism of our confusion, rather than telling us for sure what actually happened."[11] Richard Roeper greatly enjoyed the film, calling it the second best film of 2001.
A more mixed review from The New York Times early on calls the film a "highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory", but then notes:
- As it leaves behind the real world and begins exploring life as a waking dream (this year's most popular theme in Hollywood movies with lofty ideas), Vanilla Sky loosens its emotional grip and becomes a disorganized and abstract if still-intriguing meditation on parallel themes. One is the quest for eternal life and eternal youth; another is guilt and the ungovernable power of the unconscious mind to undermine science's utopian discoveries. David's redemption ultimately consists of his coming to grips with his own mortality, but that redemption lacks conviction.[12]
A negative review was published by Salon.com, which called the film an "aggressively plotted puzzle picture, which clutches many allegedly deep themes to its heaving bosom without uncovering even an onion-skin layer of insight into any of them."[13] The review rhetorically asks:
- 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....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.[13]
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian[6] and Gareth Von Kallenbach of Film Threat[14] compared Vanilla Sky unfavorably with Open Your Eyes. Bradshaw says Open Your Eyes is "certainly more distinctive than" Vanilla Sky, which he describes as an "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise." Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a version of Amenábar's film.[2] A Village Voice reviewer characterized it as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism".[15]
Diaz's performance, however, was critically acclaimed, with the Los Angeles Times film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality"[16] and the New York Times reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance,[12] also receiving a Golden Globe nomination, a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, a Critics' Choice Awards nomination, and an AFI Awards nomination.
British television personality Jeremy Clarkson stated during an interview with Timothy Spall on BBC motoring series Top Gear that Vanilla Sky is one of his favourite films[17].
Music
Vanilla Sky featured original compositions from Nancy Wilson and one original composition by Paul McCartney. Other songs used in the film include those from Sigur Rós, Radiohead, R.E.M., Joan Osborne, Todd Rundgren, Thievery Corporation, Underworld, Jeff Buckley, U2, The Beach Boys and The Chemical Brothers. It features the track "Untitled #4 (a.k.a. 'Njósnavélin')" by Sigur Rós, but because the track had not been recorded in a studio during production, the version featured in the film is a recording of a live performance at the 2000 Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Crowe thought Vanilla Sky had musical overtones, and expressed this through the use of music throughout the film. Music from Vanilla Sky was released as the film's commercial soundtrack. The soundtrack received acclaim from soundtrack critics. The film's musical selection not only perfectly evokes the emotions sought by the cast, but is alone a compilational masterpiece; the soundtrack is responsible in large part for making Vanilla Sky a cult classic.[18][19][20]
The song "The Healing Room" by Sinead O'Connor can also be heard during the video presentation of "Lucid Dream" in Rebecca Dearborn's office, although it is not featured in the soundtrack.
Toledo, OH band HIGHLAND released their "Only From My Mind" EP on June 24, 2009 with a ballad entitled "Vanity" which singer/songwriter of the band, Jake Pilewski, states was influeced by both Vanilla Sky and the "pride scene" from Se7en.
The songs "David" and "I'm Not Afraid" by Post-Hardcore Band On The Sidewalk Bleeding contain several references to Vanilla Sky.
See also
References
External links
