Good intentions, noble failure

Rating: 4/10 (14 December 2001)

I was rooting for this film. Cameron Crowe has made some of the best American commercial films in the last two decades, an oeuvre that includes: Fast times at Ridgemont High; Say Anything (arguably one of the best teen films ever made); Jerry Maguire; and the celebratory Almost Famous. As always, Crowe was working with some of the best talents in the industry, including cinematographer John Toll (The Thin Red Line; Almost Famous) and a cast that included Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Kurt Russell (who hardly resembles Elvis here), Timothy Spall, Jason Lee, and a small part by the always remarkable Tilda Swinton.

So, what the hell went wrong?

In the film, Tom Cruise plays a CEO of a large corporation who is involved on a "friend/lover" basis with Cameron Diaz. When he wakes up at the beginning of the movie, he hears Penelope Cruz's character telling him to wake up. He does, and drives to Manhattan, which is totally devoid of people. Then, he wakes up again....it was a dream.....only to hear Cameron Diaz's voice waking him. Later, he meets Penelope Cruz's character at a party, accompanied by Jason Lee's character, who is Cruise's best friend. The chemistry between Cruise and Cruz is immediate.

At this point, VS takes off into a variety of directions involving various time shifts, including a car accident with the now stalking Diaz character which leaves her dead and Cruise horribly facially disfigured. In an overlapping thread, he is charged with a murder, although the discourse doesn't let on exactly who he was alleged to have killed. The leit motif of the movie is to "wake up," as Cruise desperately tries to get clear about what is happening to him, what has happened to him, and where the tsunami of circumstances is taking him. Eventually, he begins to question the very nature of his reality as he experiences his interpersonal, internal, and physical life collapsing at every turn.

Vanilla Sky is the latest addition to the '01 dreamscape genre following the absorbing noir Memento (not a dream, but plays like one), and two brilliant entries: David Lynch's hypnotic and enigmatic Mulholland Drive; and the compelling Richard Linklater film, Waking Life. These last three films are some of the finest movies of the year (all on my best 10 list), and a cross comparison with VS reveals a great deal.

Two of these better cinematic entries possess a cohesive center. Even though Memento is a precise exercise in non-linearity, the film presents a strong central character with a connecting plot thread: he has lost his short term memory, and is trying to go back in time to solve a murder. Waking Life takes its protagonist on a clear line of interactions with remarkable people. The film-maker's reality comes to us at the same time as the protagonist's, which gives us the sense that we are journeying together with the dreamer. Mulholland Drive appears to make no sense and would seem to suffer from the same problems as VS, but Lynch's cinematography is so mesmerizing, the acting so compelling, the writing so damn brilliant, the scenes so unforgettable, and so incomprehensively real and surreal, that it works anyway.....arguably, it might be the best film of the year.

But VS possesses a plot structure that keeps jerking the audience around; the discourse becomes increasingly incomprehensible which leaves the audience with a strained ability to relate to the characters and keep up with the capricious plot changes to the point where the audience becomes exhausted past the point of caring. And the payoff, when it comes, seems weak and tacked on. Ultimately, the ending rearranges the film's tone and meaning which reduces it from an overly confused non-linearity to a trivial mess with a "feel good" message that seems even more pretentious and contrived than Spielberg's false endings in "A.I."

I'm reminded of a story involving James Stewart when he was originally offered to play Scotty in Hitchcock's Vertigo. Initially, Stewart turned down the first draft of the script because he felt that the film had nothing to ground it in reality. But, when Samuel Taylor rewrote the script and included Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Stewart was said to exclaim, "Now we have a picture!" because he correctly realized that now the film had a center that would give the audience a hook....someone with whom they could relate as the action became increasingly surreal and strange. That, I believe, is the central problem with VS, which offers the viewer no center, and therefore no hope of maintaining verisimilitude. Any connection the audience might hope to establish with the movie vanishes long before the film-makers flash the final credits.

**1/2 stars for me (despite the problems) for the good performances, the look of the film, Crowe's good intentions (a noble failure), and the fact that any film is automatically improved that involves Tilda Swinton.