Transcends the original

Rating: 9/10 (4 March 2003)

Here in Vanilla Sky, a thoughtful reprise of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes (1997), directed by Alejandro Amenabar, we have Tom Cruise, American heart throb and box office buffo paired with his current true love, the amazingly beautiful and very talented Penelope Cruz.
Guess what happens. The public doesn't like him. Even though this is a more finely structured and comprehensible film than Open Your Eyes (we'll get to that in moment), Tom Cruise is NOT sympathetic, or at least it takes us until near the end of the film to feel any sympathy for him, and then perhaps what we feel most sympathetic for is the mask that is Tom Cruise in most of the later reels.
I think the problem is that Cruise is miscast. Unlike Eduardo Noriega, who played the same part in the film directed by Alejandro Amenabar, Cruise is too cute and too privileged to elicit our sympathy. We almost feel his character has it coming. After all, he willingly got into the car with his "stalker" (Cameron Diaz) presumably to have a little sexual fun. And this just after spending a Platonic night with Sofia (Penelope Cruz), whom he is now supposed to be in love with. Furthermore--and this may be just a minor point, but a telling one--Cruise's disfigurement was not as gross as was Noriega's. One gets the sense that perhaps Cruise insisted on it being that way.
From another angle, one might ask, is this deja vu all over again? Recall that Cruise was married to Nichole Kidman when he played opposite her in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Guess what happened. The public didn't like it. Aside from the fact that they didn't understand it, what they didn't like was Tom Cruise. He was NOT sympathetic. One could not identify with his cruising various kinky sexual opportunities as a privileged married doctor.
Having said all that, I still think that this film, directed by the very talented Cameron Crowe, who wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and wrote and directed Almost Famous (2000), is the better film. Why? Mainly because Crowe demonstrates a better understanding of the underlining theme of the film than did Amenabar. (Of course he had the benefit of Amenabar's film to improve upon.)
What I am getting at is the precarious nature of our brain's experience of reality. On one level, I think that is what the film is really all about. (On another level of course there is a love triangle.) Throw the cryonics mumble jumble out the window and consider that we might, as some people believe, become software. As partial products of our own culture we will (at least in the beginning) experience glitches that will destroy our dreams, just as David Aames's guilty conscience destroyed his lucid dream and made him see a projection of his fear and his guilt instead of seeing his beloved Sofia.
If we do become software, there will be imperfect matches between our biological nature and the artificial neural nets we will fuse with. We will not be freezing ourselves in the future. Instead we will merge with our machines as we live and become part human and part artificial intelligence--something beyond human. This is the glimpse of the future that Cameron Crowe extends to us, a possibility that he saw in the Spanish language film not fully worked out by Amenabar.
Despite his miscasting, I think Tom Cruise gave a spirited performance, and I think only his celebrity and the compromised personality of the character he plays kept some movie goers from fully appreciating his work.
Penelope Cruz is more playful here than she was in Open Your Eyes and her role here is somewhat larger. Crowe makes sure she has ample time in front of the camera to mesmerize us, and she does. At some point I realized that she reminded me a little of Audrey Hepburn. Perhaps she has been watching some of Miss Hepburn's films. (I would bet on it.) Regardless, she, whom I first saw in Belle Epoque (1992) when she was eighteen, is utterly bewitching.
Also giving an excellent performance is Cameron Diaz as the fatally scorned other woman. She brings a sexy, haunting quality to the part that works well with Cruise's software "experiences." She is not quite as convincing a stalker as was Najwa Nimri in the original, however, and this may be another reason that this film only gets 7.0 out of 10 stars from the voters at IMDb while Open Your Eyes gets 7.8.
Usually I prefer the original to the remake, the European film to the Hollywood production, but in this case I think it is Vanilla Sky that will be remembered. At any rate, look past Tom Cruise's celebrity and see this for Cameron Crowe whose vision of a virtually real future is intriguing and reveals that he did his homework.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)