Not quite there........

Rating: 5/10 (8 October 2008)

I am a big fan of Cameron Crowe. Liked "Say Anything"; liked "Jerry Maguire" a lot; love "Almost Famous". I was really prepared to like "Vanilla Sky".
And what's not too like? Good performances all around, unsurprising from Kurt Russell and Penelope Cruz, but a little surprising from Tom Cruise and amazing from Cameron Diaz. I thought her métier was only comedy. I was wrong.
The film looks great.
Good special effects and sound.
So--what's the problem? Why only a 5? The first problem is that the film feels about 1/3 too long. After all, groping, even with pretty people like Cruise and Cruz and Diaz, is basically tedious. (I wonder when directors will learn that most sex scenes are in fact very boring. We've been (over)doing this since the 60s. Enough.) Nearly all scenes drag on too long. Of course, I believe that this might well be a strategy to give a dreamlike quality to the film. For this reviewer, it didn't work.
The second problem is that the dialogue (usually a strength in Crowe's films) sometime just rings false. Take Julie's dialogue just before she rams her car into a bridge to try and kill herself and David. To me, this ranting about "Your body makes a promise" and "You were inside me four times" (I will not quote the last line, since this is a family site) sounds like a ludicrous cross between Oprah, "Desperate Housewives" on a bad day, and a particularly inept porn movie.
The third, simply, is the structure of the plot. This is far from the first time we have seen this same plot; for instance, "Jacob's Ladder" (in my mind a very bad movie indeed) is nearly identical from a structural point of view. For a plot of this type to succeed, the writer needs to very carefully slip clues along the way so that the audience reaction to the final revelations is a mix of "Cool!" and "Why didn't I see that coming?" (Best example I know is "Unbreakable".) The fourth, I admit, may be idiosyncratic. Crowe's usual technique of weaving pop songs on the soundtrack just does not seem to jell with the material as well as it does in other films.
Net this all together and you have a film that feels too long, sometimes sounds silly, have a soundtrack that is not always well matched to the action, and where the structure and resolution of the plot don't work well. Do not get me wrong--I think the final sequence from the elevator to the end is far and away the best thing in the film.
A miss, a palpable miss. I wish that I could like it better--but I can't.