Vanilla Sky

Vanilla Sky Information

Vanilla Sky is a 2001 American science fiction film directed, co-produced, and co-written by Cameron Crowe. It is an English-language remake of the 1997 Spanish film, Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The film stars Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz. Jason Lee and Kurt Russell appear in supporting roles.

It has been described as "an odd mixture of science fiction, romance and reality warp".

Plot

David Aames (Tom Cruise) was the wealthy owner of a large publishing firm in New York City after the death of his father. From a prison cell, David, in a prosthetic mask, tells his story to psychiatrist Dr. Curtis McCabe (Kurt Russell): enjoying the bachelor lifestyle, he is introduced to Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) by his best friend, Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), at a party. David and Sofia spend a night together talking, and fall in love. When David's former girlfriend, Julianna "Julie" Gianni (Cameron Diaz), hears of Sofia, she attempts to kill herself and David in a car crash. While Julie dies, David remains alive, but his face is horribly disfigured, forcing him to wear a mask to hide the injuries. Unable to come to grips with the mask, he gets drunk on a night out at a bar with Sofia, and he is left to wallow in the street.

David is awakened the next day by Sofia, who apologizes for not helping him, and brings him home. The two continue to see each other, and David has his face repaired. Despite the seemingly perfect life, David finds oddities, such as brief visions of his distorted face, and a man (Noah Taylor) at a bar that tells him he can change the world. One day, when he goes to Sofia's apartment, he finds Julie there instead; all of the previous mementos of Sofia now showing Julie's face. Angry and confused, David suffocates Julie, and is later arrested and placed in a mental institution. The court psychologist Curtis talks about the incident with David over several sessions. During one interview, David sees a nearby TV advertisement for "Life Extension", a company that specializes in cryonic suspension, finding the name familiar. Under Curtis's guard, David is taken to the Life Extension offices, where the salesclerk (Tilda Swinton) explains they freeze people just after the point of death, until a cure for their ailment is available in the future - placing them in a lucid dream state. David becomes anxious and breaks free of Curtis, realizing he is in his own lucid dream that has gone wrong, and calls for tech support.

David finds himself in the empty lobby of the offices, and the man whom he has seen earlier at the bar appears, claiming to be David's tech support. As they ride up in an elevator to the top of an impossibly tall building, the man explains that David has been in cryonic sleep for 150 years, after he killed himself with a drug overdose. Because of David's severe acrophobia, his anxiety increases as he rises, trapped in an elevator while learning that when he signed a contract with the cryogenics company preserving him, he opted to start the lucid dream shortly after his drunken night when Sofia left him, under the "vanilla sky" from a Monet painting. However, during his sleep, the dream went horribly wrong and attempted to incorporate elements from his subconscious, such as placing Julie in for Sofia and creating a father-figure like Curtis. As they arrive at the top of the building, the man offers David a choice: either to be reinserted into the corrected lucid dream, or to wake up by taking a literal leap of faith off the roof. David decides to wake up, and envisions Sofia and Brian to say his goodbyes. Conquering his final fear, David jumps off the building, his life flashing before his eyes, and whites out immediately before hitting the ground. A female voice commands him to "open your eyes" (a recurring theme in the movie), and the film ends with David opening his eyes.

Cast

Tom Cruise as David Aames
Penélope Cruz as Sofia Serrano
Kurt Russell as Dr. Curtis McCabe
Jason Lee as Brian Shelby
Cameron Diaz as Julianna "Julie" Gianni
Noah Taylor as Edmund Ventura/Tech Support
Timothy Spall as Thomas Tipp
Tilda Swinton as Rebecca Dearborn
Michael Shannon as Aaron
Ken Leung as Art Editor
Shalom Harlow as Colleen
Oona Hart as Lynette
Ivana Mili?evi"? as Emma
Johnny Galecki as Peter Brown
Jhaemi Willens as Jamie Berline
Alicia Witt as Libby
Jennifer Aspen (uncredited) as Nina
Steven Spielberg (uncredited) as Guest at David Aames' Party

Production

The shooting of the scene of the deserted Times Square in New York was filmed in Times Square on November 12, 2000, in the hours before 10 am. A large section of blocks around Times Square were closed off while this scene was shot.

The title of this film is a reference to depictions of the skies in some of the paintings of Claude Monet. American Cinematographer magazine wrote a feature story on the lighting designer Lee Rose's work on the film.

Music

Vanilla Sky featured original compositions from Nancy Wilson and one original composition by Paul McCartney. It also features two Radiohead songs, "Everything In Its Right Place" and "I Might Be Wrong", as well as others by Sigur Rós, R.E.M., Joan Osborne, Looper, Todd Rundgren, Thievery Corporation, Underworld, Jeff Buckley, U2, The Monkees, The Beach Boys, Peter Gabriel, The Chemical Brothers, Red House Painters, Josh Rouse, Creeper Lagoon and Freur. The Beatles song "Revolution #9" is briefly sampled. The film features the track "Untitled #4 (a.k.a. 'Njósnavélin')" by Sigur Rós, but because the track had not been recorded in a studio during production, the version featured in the film is a recording of a live performance at the 2000 Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Crowe thought Vanilla Sky had musical overtones, and expressed this through the use of music throughout the film. Music from Vanilla Sky was released as the film's commercial soundtrack. The soundtrack received acclaim from soundtrack critics, praising the film's musical selection as a compilational masterpiece which perfectly evoked the emotions sought by the cast.

The song "The Healing Room" by Sinéad O'Connor can also be heard during the video presentation of "Lucid Dream" in Rebecca Dearborn's office, although it is not featured on the soundtrack. "Wrecking Ball" by Creeper Lagoon can be heard as David runs through the alley after his night clubbing with Sofia and Brian, but doesn't appear on the soundtrack either.

According to Nancy Wilson, on the audio commentary to the film on CD, the Rolling Stones' "Heaven" is also featured in the film, as he is being transported to L.E.'s offices. This is also not on the soundtrack. Another song appearing at a critical juncture in the soundtrack is "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" by Jason Pierce and performed by Spiritualized.

Another song used during the scene of Tom Cruise running through Times Square is "From Rusholme With Love" by Mint Royale, also not included on the soundtrack.

Interpretations

According to Cameron Crowe's commentary, there are five different interpretations of the ending:

"Tech support" is telling the truth: 150 years have passed since Aames killed himself and subsequent events form a lucid dream.
The entire film is a dream, evidenced by the sticker on Aames' car that reads "2/30/01" (February 30 does not occur in the Gregorian calendar).
The events following the crash form a dream that occurs while Aames is in a coma.
The entire film is the plot of the book that Brian is writing.
The entire film after the crash is a hallucination caused by the drugs that were administered during Aames' reconstructive surgery.

Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" marks the first lucid dream scene (the morning reunion after the club scene)"?all that follows is a dream.

Reception

Critical response

Initial critical reaction was highly mixed. It holds a "rotten" rating of 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 162 reviews (65 positive, 97 negative). Metacritic reported, based on 33 reviews, a "Mixed" rating of 45 out of 100.

Roger Ebert's printed review of Vanilla Sky awarded the film 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.

Ebert interpreted the ending as an explanation for "the mechanism of our confusion", rather than a device that tells "us for sure what actually happened."

Film critic, Richard Roeper, identified the film as the second best of 2001.

A more mixed review from The New York Times early on calls Vanilla Sky a "highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory", but then it 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.

A negative review was published by Salon.com, which called Vanilla Sky 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."

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.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian and Gareth Von Kallenbach of the publication Film Threat compared Vanilla Sky unfavorably to Open Your Eyes. Bradshaw says Open Your Eyes is "certainly more distinctive than" Vanilla Sky, which he describes as an "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise." Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a version of Amenábar's film. A Village Voice reviewer characterized Vanilla Sky as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism".

Despite the negative reviews, Cameron Diaz's performance was critically acclaimed, with the Los Angeles Times film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality" and The New York Times reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance. Edward Guthmann of The San Francisco Chronicle similarly says of the film, "most impressive is Cameron Diaz, whose fatal-attraction stalker is both heartbreaking and terrifying." For her performance Diaz won multiple critic's group awards, as well as earning a Golden Globe Award nomination, a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, a Critics' Choice Awards nomination, and an AFI Awards nomination. Penélope Cruz's performance, however, earned her a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Actress (in addition to her roles in Blow and Captain Corelli's Mandolin).

Box office

Vanilla Sky opened at #1 at the box office in the United States when it was first presented on December 14, 2001. The opening weekend took in a gross income of $25,015,518 (24.9%). The final domestic gross income was $100.61 million while the foreign gross income was slightly higher at $102.76m for a worldwide gross income of $203,388,341.