insincere objects of desire

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2002)

********SPOILERS! ******** SPOILERS!**********
Why did this movie have to be so dishonest? First there was the trailer shown during the "Coming Attractions" prelude to another flick which sparked my interest. It looked like this might be a good love story that becomes a thriller. That trailer was for a totally different movie, which isn't a totally bad thing because I am a movie maniac from way back and love all kinds of movies. When Vanilla Sky begins I think I see some very interesting, if not daring themes arise, the main one being that of superficial beauty and the trifling, superficial lives that stem from them. I thought "whoa!" Are Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise really taking us down this road? A better movie than I expected! Then the whole thing chickens out and the numbing, insulting foolishness begins.
Tom Cruise as David Aames is a privileged, self-centered, shallow consumer of all fine things his inherited publishing empire and good looks can buy. He even finds that, during his birthday celebration when his best friend introduces him to a pretty young woman he's just met, his good looks can buy her as well. Among all the flashy cool gadgets (a hologram of John Coltrane playing for fun) and too-fine appointments of his neat pad, Sofia (Penelope Cruz) seems like just the perfect beautiful addition; too bad for his best friend. He knows his friend is smitten with this creature, but David immediately proceeds to pursue her as well as use and flaunt her as a distancing foil against the lingering Julie, Cameron Diaz who plays his former sex-buddy. She's just another toy that's out-lived its novelty, but unfortunately has a mind -- loopy, yes -- of its own.
The beginning of the movie does paint a very good, remorseless look at someone whose life is nothing but fun and superficialities. This lead-in was the only thing that made Cruise's constant mugging, vain preening and too-grating narcissism bearable. This guy was totally in love with himself and his lifestyle. When the jilted Julie goes over the edge and exacts her revenge/suicide (something I thought had too little build-up), David Aames' life becomes a nightmare and at this point I was curious to see how his life would inevitably change.
What we see is that he loses his new love-interest who's just too repulsed by his disfigurement. We see a man who's lost the only currency he had and with his brooding ugliness -- and I don't mean his face -- has frightened his love away. That in itself is a statement either about the tenuous/shallow nature of their attachment to one another after their one chaste night together, a revelation into the superficial nature of her character or a legitimate reaction from someone who's got his number. Either is thoroughly plausible. It should have served as a wake-up call to this guy to really open his eyes.
Then we have David in a mask and I begin to think now he's in for some serious character development forced by his circumstance. Nope. We get a man so bound up in his mirror image that the only thing he can muster is rage at his doctors who cannot perform miracles and spiraling self-pity. It is an unsparingly rough portrait of someone who is truly, spiritually bankrupt, whose money cannot buy him what he desperately needs and who chooses suicide because of it. That he chooses suicide is a very harsh indicator of character in itself. He opts out because his greatest love-object, himself, has been destroyed. (Yes, he did "lose" what he thought was going to be "the Love" of his life, but how many others had there been before who were also going to be "the love"? Cruz/Cruise didn't know one another long enough for him to be that heartbroken, did they? Did they so easily exhaust the possibilities of playful, exploratory, romantic conversation during their one night together that they had to resort to watching latenight infomercials to fill the void? By the way, a thawed poodle isn't the most comforting way to advertise Cryogenic suspension.) But there's more. It doesn't get better, though.
All the silly subplots, flashbacks and misdirection come in. These add nothing whatsoever to this character who begins unsympathetic and remains the same until the very bad ending. Throughout all of these shenanigans I alternately cringed and laughed at the dialogue, the acting and the hopelessness of it all. I only wanted it to be over. In the middle of the muddle we're given the lucid dream romance between Sofia (Cruz) and David. After 9 or 10 hours together in real life David is able to convincingly and satisfyingly imagine the full person of Sophia -- who had kicked his disfigured butt to the curb -- and have a giddy romance. Whatever little we might know about the real Sofia, the one David imagines is little more than a cute caricature. Remember who drew the most accurate caricature when they drew portraits of one another? All David could draw was an excruciatingly faithful rendering of her surface beauty. He may have been blind, but she certainly wasn't.
Why am I bringing this up? Because the points this movie tries to make it so neatly refutes at the same time. She rejects him. He has her anyway in a dream sequence wherein he also gets his face back. Both characters are redeemed without effort. Actually Sofia is nothing more than an object being manipulated in David's dream, an object without a will or persona other than what he wants/needs. He recreates her as a compassionate elfin creature who loves him despite his wretchedness. (Gotta tell ya, this sort of line can even touch me if it's honest . . . crypto-romantic fool that I am.) Heck, he even gets to have a bit of revenge against Julie in this dream, but this only comes after he's begun to confuse Sofia with Julie. The truth of this confusion might be that, after awhile, he recognizes them as essentially the same and interchangeable: glittering, distracting objects of desire at opposite ends of the spectrum of hot infatuation and bored disillusionment. But again this is more of David's projection of his own undeveloped nature onto the shallow objects he desires. He just doesn't see himself as the problem. In this complete rejection of the reality that drove him to suicide he gets his way without any personal change. Look, I know this is a remake, but "Shallow Hal" is still in the theaters!!
An aside: Cryogenics. When this supposed "science" first popped up in the seventies I recall that the subject has to be frozen before brain death which occurs within 3 to 6 minutes after bodily death. If David dies by overdose in his apartment, or on the street outside the club where Penelope Cruz has rejected him, as the Tech Support guy seems to suggest, he's not going to get frozen until long after he's brain dead. Another thing is that dreaming, lucid or otherwise, is not a possibility in a brain that's cryogenically frozen: there is no cellular/neuronal activity. (Kind of how I felt after leaving the theater.)
My point with this is that science fictional elements are usually foolish and dishonest when wrenched outside the genre with little forethought other than to use them as appalling plot gimmicks that serve absolutely no deepening of insight into character but to purposely sidestep it and provide some supposed sense to what's gone on before. This guy had 150 years of dream-state but he never came close to any questions about his own flawed, vacuous sense of identity? This is one of the myriad themes of dreams. (And need we even mention the wasted efforts of his ego-generated "psychologist" to pierce his vanity, let alone address the issues of his supposed sanity? Poor Kurt Russell.) So he now has the opportunity to rejoin life with a surgically restored face and all's well in the universe. His money, now dwindling, has bought him an out after all!! If this is a suggestion of rebirth or redemption it is muddled, sentimental, cheap and pointless. When he takes that cocky plunge off the building's ledge in the final scene do we have any doubt that this is the very same guy from the beginning of the movie? Ok, he may have been punished in dreamland, but there wasn't a hint of new self-knowledge. His travails were all presented from his position of a tragic victim who neither faces his possible culpability nor surmounts his disfigurement and altered life with any higher insight.
The ultimate question may be whether we should feel anything for or identify in any way with the character of David Aames that doesn't arise from whatever associations we have of Tom Cruise. Aames is not a sympathetic or interesting character in his own rights. Fans of Tom Cruise or Cameron Crowe may feel otherwise. Since I'm not a fan of either -- I certainly have nothing against them -- I didn't get much from this movie. David Aames never really opens his eyes, no matter how many times he stared into that mirror. And if the entire movie was simply David's dream nothing new or interesting in movie-making style or real thematic substance was shown to justify the whole endeavor: the entire movie was merely a not-too-interesting diversion with no "deeper" meaning.
And furthermore: the score. It got loud and obtrusive especially when the director, Cameron Crowe, began to throw my music in there. Hey, I have my own associations with popular songs that didn't jibe with what was on the screen at all and pulled me further away . . . thankfully.
And then there's the other offer on the roof. Being in one's own cozy dreamworld for eternity is a subversive form of hell that would only appeal to a self-centered narcissist: to repeat all the static and empty combinations of feelings, memories and influences of one's past life without the hope of growth, enlightenment or change. To mention another film that many on IMDB have linked to Vanilla Sky thematically -- The Matrix -- this option is precisely the hell that movie's protagonists were set upon destroying: a machine-generated nirvana. It is quite punny that what we have in Tech Support is god as machine who offers a painless, happy solution to David's dilemma. It's a solution that restores to him all he's lost, from a god of technology we have created that asks for no evolution in return. David's remained so one-dimensional it's too late to care, though.
This movie may have had some potential, but frittered it all away for what .. . I have no idea. Actually, since I wasn't expecting a deeply thought-provoking movie I was more annoyed than anything else. That's why I've written all this mess: this mess of a movie messed around in a too-dishonest fashion when it never needed to. And I paid for this??!! But the memory of all us opening weekend zombies shuffling out of that dark theater, hushed and reluctant to look each other in the face because of our embarrassment from that movie's ending . . . That memory will last. 4/10 stars
I do have to say yea! to that final scene on the roof for one thing: its spectacular view of lower Manhattan from a vantage point higher than, and looking down upon, the now lost twin towers. It was a sort of wonderful yet elegiac view.