Vanilla Sky directed by Cameron Crowe is the
American adaptation of Alejandro Amenábar's remarkable 1997 production, Open
Your Eyes (Abre los
Ojos). Following a nearly fatal accident caused by an angry
jilted lover, Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), David Aames (Tom Cruise) experiences
a series of strange happenings in which the girl of his dreams, Sofia Serrano (Penélope
Cruz) plays a key role. Unfortunately in the course of adapting the movie to the
exigencies of the American screen, Crowe (who is credited with the screenplay),
Cruise & Co. have seen fit to make some disastrous "improvements".
One of these has to do with the main character.
In Open Your Eyes, César (Eduardo Noriega) is simply an affluent, handsome young man; in
Vanilla Sky, David is portrayed as a multimillionaire captain of industry and
world-class stud. This is the kind of glitzy dreck designed to impress the
peasants that soap opera is made of and I find it hard to see how it adds
anything to the movie. Nevertheless, it seems irrelevant to complain about niceties of
dramatic motivation when discussing a film that is nothing more than a deluxe
showcase for an expensive superstar.
Tom Cruise dominates Vanilla Sky from
beginning to end, although not by his skills as an actor. Back in 1990, in a
review of Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, Pauline Kael sarcastically
observed that Cruise "has a little-boy voice and no depth of
emotion." Sad to say, Cruise has not made much progress since then.
Whenever he wants to register emotion--for example, when he rages against the
doctors who haven't been able to restore his face--he resorts to chewing up the
scenery. Sensitive performers like Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando were capable of
suggesting a complex range of responses by a gesture, but Cruise never seems to
have mastered that lesson.
It would seem an understatement to speak of
narcissism in this context; self-advertisement would be a more appropriate term.
Outside of a porno, I can't remember too many films in which the star appeared
in so many scenes in at least a semi-nude state. In one of the first scenes in
Vanilla Sky, David jumps out of bed and immediately runs into the bathroom to
regard his features in the mirror, and the film continues to serve as Tom
Cruise's own looking glass from beginning to end. The camera loves Tom
Cruise, but why does he cling to it as if he feared it would run off and commit
adultery with one of his co-stars if he relinquished it for an instant?
In fact, Cruise's desire to have the film all to
himself may account for another of Vanilla Sky's glaring faults--the weakness of
the supporting performances. Here the comparison between Open Your Eyes and
Vanilla Sky is quite illuminating, since Penélope Cruz appears in the same role
in both pictures. Cruz is a very attractive actress, and she gives a good
performance in Open Your Eyes, but in Vanilla Sky she seems awkward and almost
out of her depth, particularly when set next to Cameron Diaz, who does a far
better job playing the villainous Julie. Cruz at least has the excuse of not working in
her native language--a problem the film tries to overcome by making her
character Spanish--but not the other performers, most of whom walk through their
roles as if in a trance.
If there is any reason to waste time discussing a
wretched piece of junk like Vanilla Sky, it is because of the way it
blatantly illustrates a paradox underlying the careers of contemporary stars.
Cruise is an iconic performer, but the source of his appeal lies in his
trademark smile. However, that trademark cannot be absent from the screen for
long. The number of scenes in which he appears disguised by a mask in this film
is nearly insignificant in comparison to the ones that show him in sycophantic
closeups--the only apparent function of the former being to keep the audience in brief
suspense until the "real" Tom Cruise reappears.
It would be no exaggeration to state that the
star has become the prisoner of his trademark. In Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley
Kubrick even maliciously alluded to this phenomenon in an amusing scene in which
a gay hotel clerk (Alan Cumming) tries to flirt with Dr. Harford while the
latter is searching for his friend Nick Nightingale. I almost expected the clerk
to lean over the desk and whisper to the object of his attentions, "You
look just like Tom Cruise!" But Kubrick, of course, did not need to
underline the point as a less skilled director like Cameron Crowe would have.
Great actors like John and Lionel Barrymore or
Sir Laurence Olivier delighted in roles that allowed them to disguise
themselves. The dazzling comedy Twentieth Century, directed by Howard Hawks,
includes a sequence in which Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) eludes his creditors
by disguising himself as a Southern colonel. Afterwards, he exclaims to one of
his cohorts, "I never thought I would sink so low as to become an
actor!" There is no small irony here in having John Barrymore recite such a
line, but the scene makes a deeper point, since Barrymore understood what
an essential role disguise plays in the game of acting.
For a knowledgeable audience in the past, the
pleasure in watching John Barrymore play Mr. Hyde, Svengali or Topaze, or his brother as
the mad monk in Rasputin and the Empress lay in submitting to the deception
while at the same time being on the watch to catch traces of the well-known star
under the disguise. Where disguise--which certainly does not have to depend on
the resources of makeup or costume--wholly vanishes, a basic ingredient of drama goes
along with it, and a movie just reduces to a monotonous series of shots of A
Famous Personality--which is just what happens in Vanilla
Sky.
To make matters worse, Vanilla
Sky replaces the unsettling ending of Open
Your Eyes with an orgy of affirmation.
In the Spanish film, a sinister researcher almost brutally reveals to César
that he has been in a state of suspended animation for the last 150 years, but
in Vanilla Sky David receives this information from a benign nerd who
also tells him that with the advances in medical science his life can start
anew. César learns he is doomed to wander through his labyrinth of
solipsistic fantasies for eternity, while David awaits the dawning of a new
day--and Crowe punctuates the sequence with a spuriously lyrical apotheosis,
replete with the the visionary return of Sofia.
The implication of Open Your Eyes is
that it is better to die once and be finished with it. Vanilla Sky's
message is that a rich kid can have his cake and eat it too--if he possesses
the foresight to have himself cryogenically preserved in advance, and doesn't
mind waiting a century or so for the eating to arrive. This specious
"good news" sounds like nothing so much as the Hegelian ruse of reason filtered through
the writings of L.Ron Hubbard. Is Tom Cruise using his movies not only to market
his own good looks but Scientology as well?
When I saw A Knight's Tale last summer,
I was hoping I had seen my bad movie for the year. Little did I know! Nothing
would have been easier than to simply transfer what was already an excellent
blueprint for a motion picture to an American setting. Nor is there anything
necessarily contemptible in such a task, but what Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise
have done with Open Your Eyes falls into a different category. It would be one thing if
their movie were just an
inept remake of a far better work. But Vanilla Sky isn't just a bad
motion picture; it's
vile.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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