Vanilla Sky shuttles Crowe into a great dialogue

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2001)

Who would have guessed that Cameron Crowe, with movies like Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire under his belt, would produce a movie like Vanilla Sky? This is not to demean his earlier movies, but Vanilla Sky shows such a surprising side to Crowe's sensibility. It shows him as a thinking artist the likes of Antonioni and the Ridley Scott of Blade Runner and perhaps, Hannibal. The company name "Life Extension" reminds one of Roy's (Rutger Hauer's) hushed line in Blade Runner, "More life," which is accompanied by the image of Roy's hand gripping the air claw-like in desire for immortality. The encased broken guitar in David Aames' apartment reminds one of the riotous rock scene in Antonioni's Blow-Up, in which a crowd of rock-lovers goes crazy over a guitar only after the musician breaks it in mid-concert. This theme of the broken object, be it guitar or human face, is picked up by Crowe and it ushers him to this table where Scott and Antonioni sit babbling their insights into humanity through film.
Also, these three films all interrogate the nature of memory. From the beginning of his cryo-freeze dream-life, David Aames' life is fashioned completely out of his memories. Life Extension tries to isolate his "good memories", most of which are not from life but from movies Aames saw as a child. This is a wonderful twist. Like Deckard's dream of the unicorn in the director's cut of Blade Runner, memory does not refer to "real" or authentic experience. One could conclude from the content of Deckard's and Aames' dreams that one never remembers primal reality, one only ever remembers other memories and impressions, all secondary. What a wonderful movie.