A rarity. A Hollywood movie with a heart and a brain.

Rating: 10/10 (23 August 2005)

This is one of those movies for me that gives me a buzz on how perfect cinema can be when it wants to be. Films that have fallen into this philosophy are The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Batman Begins and this film, Vanilla Sky. Clever, intellectual and deeply, deeply moving, this is in my opinion the best film that Cameron Crowe has made and features the finest performance of Tom Cruise's career, more so that Magnolia and Jerry Maguire (even though I love those two films too). It's just that this is a film that you can really bite into, read into, enjoy and interpret in your own way. It's a surprise that this film is like that. It is to all intents and purposes a Hollywood thriller almost, but it transcends that and becomes almost as much of a personal experience for the viewer as it obviously was for Crowe. Crowe directs and writes the movie as the master-crafts man he is, almost in a similar way that Spielberg (who makes a cameo appearance near the start of the movie) and Hitchcock have done with their own films.
Everything about this film is right, there is not a single thing wrong with it. From the performances of everyone, from Cruise to Cruz, Jason Lee, Tim Spall and Noah Taylor, to Nancy Wilson's terrific score (the acoustic guitar theme that plays throughout is deeply haunting and moving) and the terrific choices of songs for the soundtrack (one that is right up there with Pulp Fiction and Top Gun), the film is perfect in the extreme, so much so that you simply want to shout from the heavens to everyone that will listen how good it is. The tour de force of the film is the emotions it conveys, because this is quite simply the saddest and poignant film that I have ever seen. I admit, I almost cried my eyes out at the end when David has to chose between going back to his dream world or taking a chance on the real world, one without his beloved Sophia and his vanilla sky. In any other movie this final scene would have been destabilized with lesser hands and possibly have dived into a world of schmaltz and sickening sentimentality, but Crowe keeps it real, as real as a twist taking the movie 150 years into the future can be. That final moment between Cruise and Cruz is the most perfect moment in mainstream cinema.
Words cannot describe how much I love this movie. It is perfect, it probes the brains, strains the heart and proves that in Hollywood there will always be room for thought provoking and daring cinema.