Fascinating film

Rating: 8/10 (4 November 2009)

This was a fun movie to go into "cold", not having heard much about it. It seems to resolutely straddle a whole mix of genres, starting out seeming like a straightforward romantic dramedy and eventually morphing into a thriller and then a sci-fi film. It's a film about iconography and personality, the way we see our lives and the way we create a sort of universe for ourselves to live in, but in the Cruise character's case quite literally.
Cruise's performance powers the movie, and at times he's very effective. Of course you couldn't find a more suitable actor to play this super-successful and gorgeous guy who's had everything in life. His friend (Jason Lee, who seems so casual that he's distracting) tells him about how you can't enjoy the "sweet" without also tasting the "sour." It's a simple theme that's developed through the movie in more and less complex ways.
The relationship between Kurt Russell's psychologist character and Cruise's masked "killer" David is far more interesting and compelling than his friendship with the Lee character, and even perhaps arguably than the central romance between David and Penelope Cruz' Sofia. I really enjoyed Russell's work, and the moment of his self-realization at the climax is one of the most bizarre and effective moments of character acting in sci-fi genre history. The film is littered with fantastic character performances in fact; Timothy Spall and the always-riveting Tilda Swinton are among the best of these.
Crowe's direction is less literal than usual, more vague and poetic. I still don't like the way he and his collaborators used music in this movie; I found it distracting. I realize that it was part of the whole idea of the iconography that's creating his world (the clue with the "Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" cover was TOO obvious), but the mixture of new and old rock songs makes the film feel like it's old people straining too hard to be cool. All the Radiohead and that type of thing gets very tiring, and the choice of older songs like Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" is too typical. I don't like the way "Solsbury Hill" was used for example; I really don't appreciate music with lyrics playing over a dialog scene. I find myself listening too much to Gabriel's fascinating lyrics and trying to figure out if they have any connection to the scene, and I missed half of the dialog between Cruise and Cruz.
In the end though, the film is a big winner. It's the type of film that presents a lot of ideas and lets the audience chew them over. We want to know ultimately what is going on, and the climactic revelation manages to still retain some of the original poetry and mystery. That's tough to pull off. Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise have never been better IMHO; the weird sex scene between them towards the end is very disturbing and effective. The film manages to tackle some big ideas in a really entertaining way, and it's a nice film to look at.