Vanilla Sky

Vanilla Sky is a 2001 film which has been variously characterized by published film critics as "an odd mixture of science fiction, romance, and reality warp" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/14/DD192893.DTL, "part Beautiful People fantasy, part New Age investigation of the Great Beyond"http://ae.philly.com/entertainment/ui/philly/movie.html?id=53986&reviewId=6605 a "love story, a struggle for the soul, or an existential confrontation with the eternal"http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vanillasky.htm, and an "erotic adventure, romance, comedy, mystery and psychological thriller, with a dose of science fiction"http://www.cincinnati.com/freetime/movies/mcgurk/121401_vanillasky.html.

The film stars Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Penélope Cruz, Jason Lee, and Kurt Russell. It was directed by Cameron Crowe, who produced the film together with Cruise and Paula Wagner.

It is a "very close remake"http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,638653,00.html of the 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Penélope Cruz takes the role of Sofia Serrano, who is based on her character of Sofia from Abre Los Ojos.

The film grossed around 100 million dollars in U.S. box office.

The title is a reference to depictions of skies in some of the paintings of Claude Monet; Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" in the film is one clue to understanding turns that the plot takesMentioned by the director in the commentary track for the DVD release.

Plot

Tom Cruise plays David Aames, a spoiled, handsome young man who at a young age inherits 51% of his father's publishing company upon his death. The rest of the company is owned by a board of directors that Aames disparagingly calls the "Seven Dwarves." He can have anything his heart desires; nothing is beyond him. Then, one night spent with the woman of his dreams, Sofía (Penelope Cruz), leads to a fateful encounter with one of his previous lovers, Julianna Gianni (Cameron Diaz). An automobile accident leaves him severely disfigured, and on the path to sorting out his life he is arrested for the murder of a woman alleged to be Sofía, though he believes her to be Julie.

Psychologist Curtis McCabe (Kurt Russell), working on David's case, becomes something of a father figure to him, and much of the film is spent as if told from Aames' point of view as he relates his life to McCabe. Yet in his studies of David, a deeper truth seems to be lurking, involving a contract David signed and the dawning realisation that everything may not be what it seems.

During much of the film, the skies are all "vanilla" as in Monet's painting(s) — perhaps a little too much like the painting(s). That is one of the clues that Vanilla Sky is a fantasy film about dreams and simulated reality.

It is eventually revealed that this entire portion of the film has been an extended dream, assembled largely from pop-cultural images; it is also revealed that Dr. McCabe is wholly fictional. This simulated reality is a "lucid dream" facilitated by a cryonics company called "Life Extension" (LE) that has sold Aames something the company calls the "cryonic union of science and entertainment." The subject's body is kept frozen, but his or her mind is left to roam free in a simulated reality that branches from the real life at a certain point (so the subject has no recollection of his death). If something goes wrong with the simulation, the company can send technical support (played by Noah Taylor) to the subject.

In the end, technical support reveals that they have updated the software for their lucid dream and David can be reinserted into the dream with no memory of the nightmare portion, or he can be awakened 150 years after he was frozen and live in the real world with a restored, healthy body. David chooses to be awakend in the future after weighing his options. In the final scene, we hear a technician say "Open your eyes.", and he does, but it is left up to our imagination what takes place afterwards.

As Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film, the revelation at the end "explains the mechanism of our confusion, rather than telling us for sure what actually happened." http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011214/REVIEWS/112140304/1023

Critical reaction

Over 60% of the reviews were negative90 of 146 reviews were negative according to Rotten Tomatoes. One exception was Roger Ebert, whose print review gave it three out of four stars:

Think it all the way through, and Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky is a scrupulously moral picture. It tells the story of a man who has just about everything, thinks he can have it all, is given a means to have whatever he wants, and loses it because — well, maybe because he has a conscience. Or maybe not. Maybe just because life sucks. Or maybe he only thinks it does. This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times.

A more mixed review from The New York Times (NYT) early on calls the film a "highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory" but then notes:

As it leaves behind the real world and begins exploring life as a waking dream (this year's most popular theme in Hollywood movies with lofty ideas), Vanilla Sky loosens its emotional grip and becomes a disorganized and abstract if still-intriguing meditation on parallel themes. One is the quest for eternal life and eternal youth; another is guilt and the ungovernable power of the unconscious mind to undermine science's utopian discoveries. David's redemption ultimately consists of his coming to grips with his own mortality, but that redemption lacks conviction.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DEED8133FF937A25751C1A9679C8B63

A typically negative review was published by Salon.com, which called the film an "aggressively plotted puzzle picture, which clutches many allegedly deep themes to its heaving bosom without uncovering even an onion-skin layer of insight into any of them."http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/12/14/vanilla/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110 The review rhetorically asks:

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as "Vanilla Sky" in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right....But the disheartening truth is that we can see Crowe taking all the right steps, the most Crowe-like steps, as he mounts a spectacle that overshoots boldness and ambition and idiosyncrasy and heads right for arrogance and pretension — and those last two are traits I never would have thought we'd have to ascribe to Crowe.

Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a version of Amenábar's film. One reviewer from The Guardian summarized the film as "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise"; a Village Voice reviewer characterized it as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism"http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0150,atkinson,30650,20.html.

Diaz's performance got more positive reviews, with the Los Angeles Times film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality"http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie000099071dec14,0,1592334.story and the NYT reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance".

Taglines

Look at us...I'm frozen, you're dead...and I love you.
I'll tell you in another life, when we are both cats.
LoveHateDreamsLifeWorkPlayFriendshipSex
Looks Can Be Deceiving!
Open Your Eyes
Forget everything you know, and open your eyes.
Abre los ojos...
Forget everything you know about life, and just open your eyes...
Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.
What is happiness to you?
The sweet is never as sweet without the sour.

Trivia

The scene with Tom Cruise alone in Times Square is not computer enhanced. The production was given unprecedented permission to shut down Times Square for three hours on a Sunday.
During David's dream in Times Square, a clip of a scene from The Twilight Zone (episode "Shadow Play") can be seen on the center of the Budweiser Jumbotron, a deliberate reference to part of the plot for the movie . In the background, you can see actor Dennis Weaver yelling "No! Not again!"
Cameron Crowe used samples of The Conet Project, a collection of recordings of numbers stations (mysterious shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies), in certain scenes of the film. He said he used the station recordings to create a sense of confusion.
Crowe says that there are 428 references to pop culture made in the film — 429 if one made in error is included.
The tax disc on David's car reads 2/30/01, a fictional date. Though this could be easily accepted in the Times Square scenes in which Aames drives a Ferrari 250 GTO (as this is a dream), the date also appears on Aames' Ford Mustang, supposedly in real life. On the commentary, Crowe says that it was an accident, although it led to one of the different interpretations of the storyhttp://ralphbakshi.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5162#5162. While the credit "Painting by Ralph Bakshi Courtesy of Ralph Bakshi" can be seen during the end credits, it is not known exactly how much or which of his artwork was used.
During the final rooftop scenes, the surrounding buildings and landmarks are placed as they would have been remembered by David. This is most notably illustrated by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island both being much closer to the tip of Manhattan island than they are in real life.
The Monet painting depicted in the film is "Seine at Argenteuil"http://www.masterpiece-paintings-gallery.com/monet-seine-argent.htm, as can be seen clearly in the birthday episode at David's house.
Extra scenes from the crash were used in an episode of Scrubs in season 3.
During the scene where David sprints in an empty Times Square, one of the images flashing by is Tom Cruise's real-life future fiancée, Katie Holmes, further adding to the surreal nature of the film.

1) What is explained in the end is actually what happened to David. After realizing that his face couldn't be fixed and that he couldn't have Sofia, he left his company over to his father's friend, overdosed on some priscription pills, and died. Before doing so, he had arranged to be cryogenically frozen in a company called LE. He had also selected a Lucid Dream option, which allowed him to envision the perfect life that he had always dreamt of and yearned for (including a fixed face and Sofia by his side). However, his haunted sub-conscious conflicted with this feature, creating a nightmarish effect where Julie re-emerged and at times replaced the Sofia character. After David pieces the puzzle together, he is given the option of continuing the dream without any further problems or reawakening 150 years into the future (he was frozen and dreaming that long). He chooses the latter, envisions Sofia before him one last time, and faces his fear of heights by leaping off a skyskraper and into an uncertain reality. David is then awoken by the voice of someone from future who is not visible.

2) The film is one long, out of order dream/vision that David is having while in a coma after the car accident in the film. When the film starts, a voice says "open your eyes" over and over.. first in Spanish (the title of the original film).. then in English. It's Sophia's voice, not Julie's. Julie's voice comes the second time, once David wakes up from his dream of deserted times square. What is odd is that he hasn't even met Sophia yet. Why is she in his dreams? This lends major support to this theory. Perhaps she is by his bed side, urging him to awaken as he sinks deeper into his confused slumber.The only bits set in reality are those of David waking up next to Julie, going to the office, meeting Sofia at the birthday party, spending the life-changing romantic evening with her, and eventually accepting the doomed car ride from Julie. Everything before (the Times Square sequence) and after (the disfigured face, Julia/Sofia role reversal, murder mystery, and cryogenics solution) is part of David's coma--a mismash of anxieties, desires, fears, hopes, wonders, and ultimate refelection on his choices, karma, destiny, and life overall. It can be explained that the bizarre freezing bit was dropped in his coma because David's magazine empire actually covered a story on the clinic before he was in the accident. Thus, he recalled it and attempted to employ it as a means to make his coma state more pleasant. At the end, David awakens from his coma, but whether or not Sofia is there waiting for him, whether or not Julie is dead (it's presumable that she is though), and whether or not his face is disfigured) are questions that will remain a mystery for the rest of time.

3. The film is actually depicting a story that Brian Shelby wrote about his best friend David Aames. It is apparent throughout Vanilla Sky that Brian is a writer and is works closely with David. The entire movie can be described as Brian struggling to compete with David ,and being the underdog that has his love taken from him (Sophia)and brought back. Brian goes on to write on how David Aames will somehow find away to escape the inevitable and buy his way out of this life, and into the next. Toward the climax of the film, Brian ends up saving the life of David Aames by appearing by his side to help him make the choice of waking up, or to commence his Lucid Dream.

References

External links

The "secrets" of the film, from the Internet Archive copy of a fan's now-offline website