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David Aames (Tom Cruise) inherits 51 percent of his father's publishing business when his parents
die in a car crash, forcing him to act as head of the company without having been trained for the job. Handsome, irrresponsible and hopelessly superficial, he has a sex
buddy named Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), a scintillating blonde, but falls for the exotic charms of Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz) with whom he locks eyes at his 33rd birthday
party. He ends up staying overnight—without sex—at Sofia's apartment only to discover the next morning that a jealous Julie has been stalking him. They drive off
with Julie at the wheel furiously engaged in an emotional tug-of-war, until the car flies off a bridge and hits a concrete wall, killing Julie and leaving the pretty boy David
with a disfigured face and a murder charge.
But whose murder? From here on the movie turns into a jigsaw puzzle of an abstract painting—you're
never quite sure if you're putting the pieces into the right place because only the painter knows what the picture really is.
Or does he know at all? A reworking of Alejandro Amenabar's film "Abre Los Ojos" (Open Your Eyes), Vanilla Sky
is the kind of movie you need to watch three times in order to get half the story clear. It's full of surprises, flashbacks, forays into the world of the mentally disturbed, so that in the end you get reality, hallucination, truth, illusion, science fiction and ethics layered one on top of the other like half-cooked pancakes—and just as gooey. Then the line between real and surreal vanishes. Is director Cameron Crowe putting you on? No, but he seems unable to complete the puzzle he created, being lost himself in the tangle of his own gimmicks.
Don't bother to unravel Crowe's entangled creation. Despite Cruise's lack of sympathy
for his character and Cruz's pathetically inconsistent performance, Vanilla Sky
is still entertaining and profound in its own right, being pregnant with moral issues for the stressed-out, self-centered modern man to examine. There's the issue of self-worth: why does losing his pretty face devastate a man? Of vanity: how far would a handsome man go to regain his lost looks? Of playing God: you can make lucrative business out of other people's desire for immortality. Of the futility of unearned wealth: would David have been more sensitive if he weren't so spoiled? Of depth of friendship: must loyalty end when self-interest begins? Then there's the burning issue of irresponsible sex (which is actually at the root of David's destruction)—when Julie fumes over being called a "f_ _k buddy," her real need for intimacy surfaces in their fight as she blurts out "When you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not!" Even just for this, it's a good film for philanderers to see.
(Date reviewed: February 8, 2002)
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