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Vanilla Sky

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For other uses, see Vanilla Sky (disambiguation).
Vanilla Sky
File:Vanilla sky post.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed byCameron Crowe
Written byCameron Crowe
Alejandro Amenábar
Mateo Gil
Produced byCameron Crowe
Tom Cruise
Paula Wagner
StarringTom Cruise
Cameron Diaz
Penélope Cruz
Kurt Russell
Jason Lee
Noah Taylor
CinematographyJohn Toll
Edited byJoe Hutshing
Mark Livolsi
Music byNancy Wilson
Production
companies
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release date
December 14, 2001
Running time
136 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$68 million[1]
Box office$203,388,341

Vanilla Sky is a 2001 American psychological thriller film directed, co-produced, and co-written by Cameron Crowe. The film is a remake of the Spanish movie Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) (1997), the screenplay for which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The film stars Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and Penélope Cruz (in a repeat of her performance in Abre los ojos), with Jason Lee and Kurt Russell.

Vanilla Sky has been described 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 and a struggle for the soul,"[4] and an "erotic adventure, romance, comedy, mystery, and psychological thriller, with a dose of science fiction."[5]

Plot

David Aames (Tom Cruise) becomes the heir of his deceased father's New York City publishing company, and he enjoys the lifestyle of a wealthy bachelor in New York City. He has a casual, on-off relationship with Julianna (Cameron Diaz), but during a party in his home he is introduced to Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) by his best friend Brian Shelby (Jason Lee). David and Sofia spend a romantic, though not sexual, night together in her apartment; David feels he may have found his soulmate. However, Julianna, after seeing David and Sofia leave together, is consumed by jealousy. Julianna waits for David outside Sophia's apartment the next morning, and offers David a ride when he leaves. She then drives them off a bridge on purpose and crashing into a brick wall. Julianna is killed on the spot, but David survives though unconscious. David wakes up to find that he has a face shattered so badly that he has to wear a custom-made mask to hide the disfigurement. He tries to continue seeing Sofia, but she finds his resentment and bitterness about the accident difficult to deal with. After he gets drunk at a bar and falls asleep in a puddle in the street outside, Sofia walks away, leaving with Brian.

The next day, David wakes up in the street to find Sofia bending over him, anxious to help. They continue to date and grow closer, and David has successful cosmetic surgery to restore his face. Despite the perfect life, David starts to notice oddities in his perception of the world; at times, it appears that his face has reverted to the disfigured state, and he encounters a strange man (Noah Taylor) at a bar who tells him he has the power to change the world. One day, at Sofia's apartment, he finds that Sofia, and every image he knew of her, has been replaced by Julianna, and in a bout of madness, suffocates her. He is arrested and assigned a court psychologist, Dr. Curtis McCabe (Kurt Russell), who tries to determine the cause of David's insanity. After recollection from an advertisement on television for a service called "Life Extension", David and Dr. McCabe visit the Life Extension office in a skyscraper. They learn that they offer to put clinically-dead patients into cryonic suspension to be awakened in the future when cures may be available; the patients are given the option of a "lucid dream" to keep their mind occupied over the years. David recognizes the term, and escapes from Dr. McCabe's control, shouting for the lucid dream's "tech support". Arriving in the now-empty lobby, David is met by the man from the bar, his tech support.

As the two ride an elevator up to impossibly tall heights, the man explains that David is a patient of Life Extension, and is experiencing his own lucid dream. David opted for the process after the accident, when he found his face could not be repaired, having said his farewells to Brian and Sofia and passing control of the company to a trusted adviser. David chose to start the lucid dream the morning after he passed out in the street outside the bar, under the "vanilla sky" from his mother's original Monet paintings and reunited with Sofia. However, over the 150 years he has been in cryonic suspension, his lucid dream malfunctioned, turning into a nightmare and reintroducing Julianna and other unpredictable elements from David's subconscious such as Dr. McCabe as a father-figure. As David and the man exit the elevator atop the huge skyscraper, the man offers David two choices: to be reinserted into the rectified lucid dream, or to wake up, the latter requiring David to take a leap of faith off the top of the building. The final choice is supposedly a subconscious one: David has always been terrified of heights, and this skyscraping, high-flying decision is his last. David opts to wake up, and takes a moment to say goodbye to the lucid dream versions of Brian, Dr. McCabe, and Sofia that have appeared on the roof. David jumps over the side, his memories flashing before his eyes, and wakes up moments before he hits the ground; the screen goes to gray and a woman's voice tells David to open his eyes. The film ends with an extreme closeup of an eye opening up.

Cast

Production

The shooting of the scene where there is a completely-empty Times Square in New York was filmed in Times Square on November 12, 2000, in the hours before 10 am. A large section of blocks around Times Square was closed off while this scene was shot.

The title of this film is a reference to depictions of the skies in some of the paintings of Claude Monet.[6]

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, Looper, Todd Rundgren, Thievery Corporation, Underworld, Jeff Buckley, U2, The Monkees, The Beach Boys, Peter Gabriel, The Chemical Brothers,Josh Rouse and Freur. 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, praising the film's musical selection as a compilational masterpiece which perfectly evoked the emotions sought by the cast; the soundtrack is responsible in large part for making Vanilla Sky a cult classic.[7][8][9]

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 on the soundtrack.

According to Nancy Wilson, on the director's track commentary to the film on CD, the Rolling Stones' "Heaven" is also featured in the film, as he is being transported to L.E.'s offices. This is also not on the soundtrack. Another song appearing at a critical juncture in the soundtrack is "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" by Jason Pierce and performed by Spiritualized.[10]

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 film 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 film after the crash is a dream that takes place while David is in a coma.
  • The entire film is the plot of the book that Brian is writing.

Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" identifies the first lucid dream scene (morning reunion after club scene). All that follows is a dream.[6]

Reception

Critical response

Initial critical reaction was from mixed to negative. It currently holds a 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 160 reviews (63 positive, 97 negative).[11] Metacritic reported, based on 33 reviews, a "Mixed or Average" rating of 45 out of 100.[12]

Roger Ebert's printed review of Vanilla Sky gave it a quite positive 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."[13] The film critic Richard Roeper greatly enjoyed this film, calling it the second best film of 2001.

A more mixed review from The New York Times early on calls Vanilla Sky a "highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory", but then it 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.[14]

A negative review was published by Salon.com, which called Vanilla Sky 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."[15]

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.[15]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian[16] and Gareth Von Kallenbach of the publication Film Threat[17] compared Vanilla Sky unfavorably to 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 Vanilla Sky as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism".[18]

Cameron Diaz's performance, however, was critically acclaimed, with the Los Angeles Times's film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality"[19] and the New York Times reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance,[14] also receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination, a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, a Critics' Choice Awards nomination, and an AFI Awards nomination.

In 2010,Vanilla Sky was voted as the most confusing movie of all time in a poll conducted by LoveFilm.com.[20]

The British television host Jeremy Clarkson stated during an interview with Timothy Spall on BBC motoring series Top Gear that Vanilla Sky is one of his favorite films.[21]

Cult following

Over the years, the film has amassed a large cult following on the internet[22][23][24][25], with online discussion and websites hailing it as an 'underrated masterpiece'.[26][27][28]

Box office

Vanilla Sky opened at #1 at the box office in the United States when it was first presented on December 14, 2001. The opening weekend took in a gross income of $25,015,518 (24.9%). The final domestic gross income was $100.61 million while the foreign gross income was slightly higher at $102.76m for a worldwide gross income of $203,388,341.[29]

See also

References

  1. ^ IMDb estimate
  2. ^ a b Guthmann, Edward (December 14, 2001). "Vanilla guy / Smirky Tom Cruise lacks the depth for complex, surreal film". The San Francisco Chronicle.
  3. ^ http://ae.philly.com/entertainment/ui/philly/movie.html?id=53986&reviewId=6605
  4. ^ Journal of Religion and Film: Vanilla Sky Review by Jason M. Flato
  5. ^ Movies: Cincinnati.Com
  6. ^ a b Mentioned by the director in the commentary track for the DVD release
  7. ^ Candler, T C. "INDEPENDENT CRITICS - Review Page". www.independentcritics.com. Retrieved 2009-02-23. [dead link]
  8. ^ Green, Brad. "VANILLA SKY: SOUNDTRACK". Urban Cinefile. Retrieved 2009-02-23.
  9. ^ O'Faolain, Eoin. "5 Soundtracks that are Better than their Movies". www.screenhead.com. Retrieved 2009-02-23.
  10. ^ "VANILLA SKY (2001) Soundtrack".
  11. ^ Rotten Tomatoes. "Vanilla Sky".
  12. ^ Metacritic. "Vanilla Sky". Retrieved 2007-12-03.
  13. ^ "Vanilla Sky". Chicago Sun-Times.
  14. ^ a b Holden, Stephen (December 14, 2001). "FILM REVIEW; Plastic Surgery Takes A Science Fiction Twist". The New York Times.
  15. ^ a b Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | "Vanilla Sky"
  16. ^ Bradshaw, Peter (January 25, 2002). "Vanilla Sky". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 27, 2010.
  17. ^ Review by Gareth Von Kallenbach, Film Threat
  18. ^ village voice > film > Icon See Clearly Now by Michael Atkinson
  19. ^ From Paella to Pot Roast - MOVIE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com
  20. ^ WENN. "Cruise's Vanilla Sky Voted Most Confusing Movie". Retrieved 2010-08-22.
  21. ^ "Top Gear; Series 06, Episode 11".
  22. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259711/board/
  23. ^ http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments=1&v=CHtF8PADoN0
  24. ^ http://community.livejournal.com/vanillasky
  25. ^ http://www.killermovies.com/v/vanillasky/reviews/hd9.html
  26. ^ http://www.movietome.com/movie/280982/vanilla-sky/index.html
  27. ^ http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2202796136
  28. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259711/usercomments?start=10
  29. ^ "Vanilla Sky (2001)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved December 16, 2009.
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