Vanilla Sky (2001) Review

rating: *****

the story: A perfect life goes off the rails in disorienting ways.

review: I just watched Vanilla Sky for the first time. It’s one of those films that took on instant notoriety, so that if you never saw it all you knew was that it was probably problematic at best, incomprehensible at worst. It could not have arrived in theaters at a better, or worse, time.

It’s a remake, but that didn’t help anyone make any better sense of it. It was just weird. 2001 gave us two other, similarly complex films at even more diverging ends of the spectrum. One was A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a Spielberg movie that was also a Kubrick movie, and no one knew what to make of that. The other was Memento, the movie that made Christopher Nolan’s career. With Vanilla Sky, this was a mind-bending confluence of films that seemed to try and reconcile the cerebral injection of M. Night Shyamalan into the language of American cinema. And of course only one of them survived in the popular consciousness, the new voice.

Ten years later Nolan had reprocessed it into Inception, of course, but that was well after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had already gotten there, a critical favorite but a box office dud.

Funny enough, but Vanilla Sky might almost be termed an earnest remake of another Jim Carrey film, The Mask. Cameron Crowe seems to go out of his way to evoke the comparisons early in the film, from the casting of Cameron Diaz herself to Tom Cruise aping Carrey’s cartoonish antics for a brief but memorable moment.

And, I gotta say, I really wish anyone remembered any of this.

Crowe was a Hollywood golden boy for a split second. He had a huge success with Jerry Maguire, and then followed that up with the well-received Almost Famous, a version of his own origins. Then he made Vanilla Sky and suddenly could do nothing right.

This is easily his most ambitious film. Anyone, regardless of how they view the merits of the end result, should be able to admit that. Heck, it’s arguably Cruise’s best spotlight, too, at last willing to let it all hang loose. And it’s fascinating. And it spins its web about as seductively as any film appearance Penelope Cruz has ever made, so human and yet so very intoxicating at the same time. And the big twist, even if you know the source material, works, too, for all the subtle setup put into it. The results never lose sight of the end goal, and never wallow in misery. (The only real comparison I have to that is Steven Knight’s brilliant Serenity.) Cruise always has something interesting to work off of, a different character, whether Diaz, Cruz, or Kurt Russell or Jason Lee. There’s even Michael Shannon in a small role for future-proof credibility!

Having now seen it, and maybe it’s the subsequent history of film, and even the equally ambitious TV show Lost I have the pleasure to draw from, but I’m so, so glad to have done so. The history of film in the 21st century falls a little more clearly into place, and a classic takes its place in history.

Hopefully other viewers catch up at some point, too.