Vanilla Sky
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| Vanilla Sky | |
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| Directed by | Cameron Crowe |
| Produced by | Cameron Crowe Tom Cruise Paula Wagner |
| Written by | Alejandro Amenábar Mateo Gil Cameron Crowe |
| Starring | Tom Cruise Penélope Cruz Cameron Diaz Jason Lee Kurt Russell |
| Editing by | Joe Hutshing |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | December 14, 2001 |
| Running time | 136 min. |
| Country | USA  |
| Language | English |
| Budget | US$68,000,000[1] |
| IMDb profile | |
Vanilla Sky is a 2001 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 Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. It 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 produced the film together with Cruise and Paula Wagner.
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[edit] Synopsis
The film opens with David Aames waking up in bed. He is an affluent, handsome young man. As he drives to work, he finds the streets of New York strangely deserted at rush hour. With growing unease he drives to Times Square and finds the entire city abandoned.
We then learn that David is in a jail cell describing a dream to Dr. McCabe, a psychologist that has been assigned to him. David has been charged with a murder he has no recollection of, and wears a mysterious pale mask. He and Dr. McCabe discuss the events that led to his eventual incarceration.
Following the death of David's father, he was given 51% ownership of his father's publishing company. The rest of the company is owned by a board of directors that David disparagingly calls the "Seven Dwarves." Each of them believed that they were next in line to take over the company after David's father died. It is clear that David can have anything his heart desires, and that nothing is beyond him. Then, on the night of his birthday party which also includes a conversation with a drunken Thomas Tipp, the company attorney and an old friend of David's father. Initially, David considered firing Thomas for what he believes is his incompetence as an attorney, but has a change of heart when Thomas makes a sad confession. David's best friend, Brian, brings with him a girl named Sofia that he just met at the library. Almost instantly, David and Sofia flirt with each other, almost completely ignoring Brian. However, Julianna Gianni, a woman that David regularly sleeps with but has no deep feelings for, decides to crash his party. She stays distant but keeps a close eye on him the entire night. Once David realizes Julianna is there, he asks Sofia to pretend to engage in a deep conversation with him so that Julianna won't come near him. David and Sofia end up hitting it off. He walks her back to her place and they stay up all night talking. The next morning as David is getting ready to drive to work, Julianna drives up beside him asking how his night with Sofia was. Julianna makes David feel guilty about ignoring her and convinces him to get into her car. It quickly becomes apparent that she is obsessed with David as she starts speeding through busy city streets, asking intimate questions of him. When he finally caves in and tells her that he loves her, she drives the car off of a bridge.
We are told that Julianna was killed. David survives but is horribly scarred and mentally unstable. He spends a long time in isolation before deciding to take back control of his company and see Sofia again. She appears hesitant to be around him, and when they go on a date she brings Brian along. The date is a disaster as David drinks too much and makes Sofia increasingly uneasy around him. The three part ways at the end of the night, and David ends up passing out on a sidewalk. He is woken up the next morning by Sofia who tells him that she will stay with him if he can get his act together. From that moment, David's life is turned around. His team of plastic surgeons are able to perfectly restore his face and he finds his soul mate in Sofia.
This does not last long. He grows paranoid that his face will go back to being scarred again, and finds himself followed by a mysterious man who tells him he has the power to control the world. One night he goes to bed with Sofia and wakes up to find himself with Julianna, who insists she really is Sofia. He is arrested and told that he severely beat Sofia, but the people from his company convince her to drop the charges and make the case go away. He is shown photos of Julianna by Thomas Tipp, with a bruised face, but everybody, including his best friend Brian, tells him that it's Sofia. David breaks into Sofia's apartment and finds that every photo that was once of Sofia is now of Julianna. Julianna attacks him, thinking he's an intruder but apologizes when she sees it's him, still insisting she is Sofia. She leaves the room, and the actual Sofia returns in her place as if nothing was wrong. They begin to make love, but while they are in the middle of the act, he finds that he is making love to Julianna. In a fit of panic, he suffocates her then realizes he has just killed Sofia.
When David is done telling Dr. McCabe his story, he still can't bring himself to believe that he killed anybody. Dr. McCabe tells him that he can no longer help David and will try to argue for temporary insanity. After Dr. McCabe leaves, David sees an infomercial for a cryogenics company called Life Extension that David had seen many times before going to jail.
Escorted by Dr. McCabe, David visits Life Extension and realizes that he had signed on as a client, and had opted for an extra feature called the Lucid Dream, which allows the client to be revived after death and live in a perpetual coma where they live in eternal youth enjoying their ideal lifestyle, and their death erased from their memory.
David finally realizes that he is now living in the Lucid Dream and that the mysterious man is his technical support. The Tech Support explains to David that he had committed suicide and had opted for his Lucid Dream to begin the morning after his night out with Sofia and Brian following the accident. Nothing after that moment was real. He never murdered anybody and he realizes that Dr. McCabe was just a character he created in his dream to be the father figure he always wanted. Among one of these realizations is that Thomas, the attorney that David considered firing in the beginning, saved the company for David and helped him regain control of the business from the board of directors. The constant pain he suffered from his disfigurement drove him to suicide. According to Dr. McCabe, the guilt he felt for the way he treated Julianna could have caused his subconscious to merge Julianna and Sofia.
In the end, technical support reveals that they have updated the software for their lucid dream and David can be reinserted into the dream with no memory of the nightmare portion, or he can be awakened 150 years after he was frozen and live in the real world with a restored body. David chooses to be awakened in the future after weighing his options despite knowing that he will still be disfigured (which the technical support reveals as an easy solution, given the changes in technology), everyone he ever knew will be long dead and that his wealth will deplete within months. After imagining himself with Sofia one last time, he jumps off of a skyscraper, ending his Lucid Dream and waking up.
[edit] Possible 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'.
- The movie takes place within David's coma sustained after the car crash.
- The movie is actually a novel that Brian is working on.
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" in the film is one clue to understanding turns that the plot takes[7].
[edit] Reaction
While the film grossed around 100 million dollars in U.S. box office[1], many of the reviews were negative.[8] One exception was Roger Ebert, whose 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." [9] Richard Roeper greatly enjoyed the film and has put it in his list for Best Films for 2001 at #2.
A more mixed review from The New York Times (NYT) 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.[10]
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."[11] 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.[11]
Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a version of Amenábar's film[2]. One reviewer from The Guardian summarized the film as an "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise"[6]; a Village Voice reviewer characterized it as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism"[12].
Diaz's performance got more positive reviews, with the Los Angeles Times film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality"[13] and the NYT reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance[10].
One critic was so upset about the movie and demanded that Cameron Crowe tell her the correct interpretation of the movie. Cameron Crowe told her to interpret it anyway she liked. She responded by saying, "I want to strangle you!"[citation needed]
[edit] Trivia
- The outfit that Sofia is wearing at the wake Brian has for David is the same outfit in the final scene where he kisses her for the last time.
- The scene with Tom Cruise alone in Times Square is not computer enhanced. The production was given unprecedented permission to shut down Times Square for three hours on a Sunday.[9]
- During David's dream in Times Square, a clip of a scene from The Twilight Zone (episode "Shadow Play") can be seen on the center of the Budweiser Jumbotron, a deliberate reference to part of the plot for the movie [7]. In the background, you can see actor Dennis Weaver yelling "No! Not again!"
- Cameron Crowe used samples of The Conet Project, a collection of recordings of numbers stations (mysterious shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies), in certain scenes of the film. He said he used the station recordings to create a sense of confusion.
- Crowe says that there are 428 references to pop culture made in the film — 429 if one made in error is included.[citation needed]
- The motor vehicle registration on David's car reads 2/30/01, a fictional date. Though this could be easily accepted in the Times Square scenes in which Aames drives a Ferrari 250 GTO (as this is a dream), the date also appears on Aames' Ford Mustang, supposedly in real life. On the commentary, Crowe says that it was an accident, although it led to one of the different interpretations of the story.[7]
- The filmmakers asked for, and received, a few paintings by Ralph Bakshi to use in the set designs for Tom Cruise's apartment[14]. While the credit "Painting by Ralph Bakshi Courtesy of Ralph Bakshi" can be seen during the end credits, it is not known exactly how much or which of his artwork was used.
- During the final rooftop scenes, the surrounding buildings and landmarks are placed as they would have been remembered by David. This is most notably illustrated by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island both being much closer to the tip of Manhattan island than they are in real life and the twin towers of the World Trade Center still being intact and standing despite the September 11, 2001 attacks, which David would not have known about.
- The Monet painting depicted in the film is "Seine at Argenteuil"[15], as can be seen clearly in the birthday episode at David's house.
- Extra scenes from the crash were used in an episode of Scrubs in season 3.
- During the scene where David sprints in an empty Times Square, one of the images flashing by, ironically or coincidentally, is Tom Cruise's real-life future wife, Katie Holmes.
- The ending theme was written and performed by Paul McCartney especially for the movie.
- The soundtrack of Vanilla Sky was the first major motion picture soundtrack to feature the Icelandic group Sigur Rós.
- One of the songs by Sigur Rós was actually recorded from a concert in Roskilde, Denmark as the original had to yet be recorded in the studio.
- Steven Spielberg appears in a cameo at David Aames's birthday party. Spielberg would return the favor to Cameron Crowe the following year by allowing Crowe to appear in a cameo in Spielberg's Minority Report. Crowe appears as a subway passenger reading the paper who stares directly at Tom Cruise after another person passes between Crowe and the camera. Cameron Diaz can be seen in the foreground as a woman talking on her cell phone. In that same year, both Spielberg and Cruise appear in cameos as themselves in Austin Powers In Goldmember (2002).
- In the movie Vanilla Sky, Cruise wears an IWC Mark XV with black crock strap on his left wrist with the face on the inside of his wrist.
- One of the photos that flash by in the ending montage is one taken of Crowe's sister leaving her family, curlers still in her hair. This pivotal moment in Crowe's life was depicted in Almost Famous, also directed by Cameron Crowe.
- In a scene, David walks with Sofia down a street purposely in the manner of the album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, even with very similar cars in the background.
- David's final line in the film, "I will see you in another life, when we are both cats," bears a resemblance to the final line of the final song of the Radiohead album Kid A: "I will see you in the next life." Interestingly, the same album's first track, Everything in Its Right Place, is the first song heard in the film.
- [SPOILER] Following the scene when David leaves Sofia's apartment on the morning after his birthday party, the last time they're on good terms in reality, Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" is playing.
[edit] 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 Radiohead, R.E.M, Sigur Rós and The Chemical Brothers. Director Cameron Crowe thought Vanilla Sky had musical overtones, and expressed this through the use of music throughout the film.
[edit] Soundtrack
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b IMDb estimate
- ^ a b http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/14/DD192893.DTL
- ^ http://ae.philly.com/entertainment/ui/philly/movie.html?id=53986&reviewId=6605
- ^ http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vanillasky.htm
- ^ http://www.cincinnati.com/freetime/movies/mcgurk/121401_vanillasky.html
- ^ a b http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,638653,00.html
- ^ a b c Mentioned by the director in the commentary track for the DVD release
- ^ 90 of 146 reviews were negative according to Rotten Tomatoes
- ^ a b http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011214/REVIEWS/112140304/1023
- ^ a b http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DEED8133FF937A25751C1A9679C8B63
- ^ a b http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/12/14/vanilla/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110
- ^ http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0150,atkinson,30650,20.html
- ^ http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie000099071dec14,0,1592334.story
- ^ http://ralphbakshi.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5162#5162
- ^ http://www.masterpiece-paintings-gallery.com/monet-seine-argent.htm
[edit] External links
- Eyes and Ears for Vanilla Sky at Cameron Crowe's Official Website
- The "secrets" of the film, from the Internet Archive copy of a fan's now-offline website
- Complete Vanilla Sky Soundtrack Listings
- Vanilla Sky at the Internet Movie Database
- Vanilla Sky at Rotten Tomatoes
- Vanilla Sky at Tom Cruise Online.com
| Films directed by Cameron Crowe |
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| Say Anything • Singles • Jerry Maguire • Almost Famous • Vanilla Sky • Elizabethtown |
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