"Vanilla Sky" is a case of the vain leading the bland.
The vanity is provided by Tom Cruise, convincing in the role of a man in a passionate love affair with his own face, and the blandness comes from the overrated writer-director Cameron Crowe, who never met a story he couldn't explain to death at length.
Penelope Cruz and Tom Cruise star in "Vanilla Sky."
(Paramount Pictures)
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Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent. Contrary to a dishonest ad campaign that promises a "Fatal Attraction" variation, it turns out to be a phantasmagoria of woe as conjured by a crybaby rich pretty boy who's been disfigured in an auto accident; it has an unsavory subtext of self-adoration, made all the creepier by its insistence that something under the skin and not merely skin is involved. I think the lad does protest too much.
Worse still, it explores ad nauseam what must be the creakiest and most ancient of movie conventions: Is it real or a dream?
The film opens deep in a narcissist's nightmare: Cruise, as rich-by-inheritance magazine publisher David Aames, awakens in his vast apartment in the Dakota on Manhattan's Upper West Side to discover that the world is empty. He runs screaming through a deserted Times Square, obviously shaken, though not at the seeming disappearance of millions. No, he has a far better reason to be upset: There's nobody around to notice how beautiful he is!
But it's only a dream, the first of too many times things turn out to be but a dream.
Fully awake, he gets on with his own exceedingly super life. He shares his bed with Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), who is clearly in love with him, though he's too busy plucking traitorous gray hairs from his dark mane to notice. He then goes off to a business day, to have meetings with the editors of the magazines he has inherited and the board that distrusts him with good reason.
That night at a birthday party (full of the damned and gorgeous who adore him), he meets another beautiful young woman named Sofia (Penelope Cruz) and is immediately dazzled by her looks and cleverness though the film can't imagine any meaningful relationship beyond puppy-flirting. Bonding cutely, they go to her apartment for a sexless evening of spooning; the next day, he discovers that Julie has followed him and he unwisely accepts a ride from her. Quickly enough, in a hissy fit of psycho jealousy, she crashes the car, killing herself and maiming him.
Now . . . he's ugly.
Well, sort of. Nobody at the studio and certainly not Cruise himself could quite convince the world's handsomest boy-man to display the true trauma of facial destruction; instead, he cavorts around in a rubbery visage of ersatz horror that you yourself can simulate in the privacy of your bathroom: Take your right finger and pull the right corner of your mouth down. Take your left finger and pull the left corner of your left eye up. This is the only way I will ever look just like Tom Cruise!
I should say that the foregoing doesn't unspool in straight time; it's presented in flashback, from the actual present of the movie, which is some sort of prison holding room where Aames, now hiding behind a "Halloween"-killer mask, is narrating his sordid tale to Kurt Russell, as a defense psychologist searching for a principle to get Aames off the hook for an undisclosed murder.
That cheap suspense by flashback is the movie's only attempt at what might be called entertainment; the rest is Cruise showing acting chops, in crude primary colors of grief, pain and charm, alternately.
His whole character is miswired for this story. In the original Spanish version of this film (1997's "Abre los Ojos"), the Cruise-antecedent (Eduardo Noriega) was a thorough skunk. Thus the film was the story of a rotter getting his, being punished, and achieving a shot at redemption in the end. It hung together.
But neither Cruise nor Crowe can bring himself to portray David as a monster; thus much of the business of the movie is finding excuses for his behavior, so that when he coldly abandons a woman, it's not his fault, because she's psycho; and when he steals a beauty from his best friend, again it's not his fault, because the friend has given permission in a hangdog kind of way.
Tom Cruise can't be nasty. His punishment is therefore arbitrary, his redemption meaningless, and the whole conception lacking a central coherence.
All of which brings me, sadly, to the ending. It's absolutely the worst – imagine the sorriest, the most trite, the most trivial story gimmick in the world. You know the one. And when that happens you say, "I can't believe they stooped that low!" It's bad enough when they do it in some late-night, obscure cable channel stinker starring Michael Pare and Morgan Fairchild. But in a major A-list film with big stars, a big director?
Worse, they don't even have the decency to do it fast. The denouement takes a full 25 minutes to spin out, narrated by a "technician" who explains the sci-fi gimmick underneath it all as he helpfully recapitulates the plot, and reconciles all the little incongruities that the director has subtly painted purple throughout the film. And you think, "Gee, they didn't stoop that low. They stooped lower."
VANILLA SKY (R, 140 minutes) – contains sexual innuendo and violence. At area theaters.
