Vanilla Sky
Private Conversation
It is, right now, at this moment, eleven o’clock at night, Friday, December 14, 2001 to be exact, the day that Vanilla Sky opened, and I have just returned from the Highland 10 cineplex after the 7:55 screening. I am sitting at my desk, which - right now - is a card table, not that it matters.
I am writing my review of Vanilla Sky now, with the full knowledge that my review of Monsters, Inc. is only three-quarters finished and my review of The Heist is still inchoate. (I can’t get past Rebecca Pidgeon and her Joan Jett hairdo, although I am sure that I will eventually.) If I did things in any logical, ordinary way I would knock out those reviews first before even trying - even attempting a Vanilla Sky review. Get them out of the way, clear out the old mental passages.
Instead, I am listening to some Aimee Mann music on the Winamp and working on Vanilla Sky. I worry that I won’t do the other reviews justice as a result; heck, I shouldn’t even have seen the movie in the first place. And I worry that this review is turning into a vain, self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness review instead of being the tight, well-reasoned review that the movie deserves. I am thinking - it is about 11:15 now - that I really ought not to try to finish this review now.
I am not sure that I will be able to sleep tonight if I don’t, though.
Tom Cruise is having trouble sleeping, too. Cruise here is one of those classic Tom Cruise characters - Charley Babbit, Danny Kaffee, Frank T.J. Mackey, Jerry Maguire - who are self-confident, good-looking, and who have the world on a string were it not for their one little flaw that humbles them and leads them to a deeper understanding of life. This particular character - David Aames is his name, as if it matters - is a scion of a famous publishing family, Steve Forbes with charisma. He has wealth, power, a perfectly non-threatening relationship with Cameron Diaz, and exactly the sort of blue-black classic Ford Mustang I would drive if I had the wherewithal. And then, at a star-studded party at his swank New York apartment to celebrate his thirty-third birthday and the sublime wonderfulness of being Tom Cruise, he meets Penelope Cruz, and they engage in some playful-yet-meaningful Cameron Crowe dialogue and fall madly in love.
All of this would be good, the kind of good, loving relationship between two beautiful, talented rich people that makes the rest of us so… envious, and asking why we, too, can’t experience something similar in our own lives. Except that Cruise, like Hamlet, cannot count himself the King of Infinite Space because of his bad dreams. The dreams are enormously vivid and strange; if Cruise’s romantic dialogue is scripted by the expert hand of Cameron Crowe, his dreams are equally illuminated by Crowe’s talent as a cinematographer. Just that, in fact, his dreams have that cinematic quality that says this is real, this is true even when all of reason and fact say that what one sees can’t exist, doesn’t exist, isn’t real. And unlike the most cinematic of dreams, they don’t fade away in the morning sunshine; don’t lose their brilliance in the early morning routine of cornflakes and razor blades and toothpaste and missing socks and NPR Morning Edition and the dreary drive to the office. They keep their resonance, to the point where they intrude on to the margins of what is real. Cruise tells us that he’s “living the dream”, but what happens when the dream lives you?
Aimee Mann again on the Winamp:
It’s not what you thought
When you first began it
You got what you want
You can hardly stand it though
By now you know
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Till you wise up
And that, in good conscience, is all I can tell you.
Well, not quite. I can tell you, first of all, that the trailers give too much away, not that they don’t usually. I can tell you that Cameron Diaz has the same sweet smile that she had in Charlie’s Angels but that it now looks vixenish instead of kittenish, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I can tell you that New York looks splendid in its autumnal glory. I can tell you that there are probably one too many celebrity cameos and that some of the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and that there are a couple of scenes that are shot in a gimmicky way. I can tell you that Cameron Crowe knows about as much about pop music as John Cusack did in High Fidelity, but that he uses his knowledge for good instead of evil. I can tell you that you may find unexpected humor in the scene where the profoundly short Cruise has his mug-shot taken, and some unintentional poignancy in a closing Manhattan panorama.
However, any additional discussion of the movie - its themes, its sense of reality, its philosophical underpinnings, what it says about happiness and love and experience and suffering - does a disservice to the reader. Vanilla Sky is not about what’s on the screen, although what is there is excellent. It’s not about the soundtrack, although it’s more than worthwhile. It’s not about the dialogue, although I imagine that some of the better lines (”My life is about to change in a zillion different ways”) will percolate into the romantic language the way that “You had me at hello” did. It’s not about the acting, although Tom Terrific is reliably good in his signature part, and the rest of the cast is absorbing if unspectacular.
Vanilla Sky is not about any of these things. It is instead about the conversation, about the process of going to the movies with a friend or a lover or a family member and walking out of the theater and going to a bar or a diner or a taco stand and talking about the movie, sharing impressions, and bouncing ideas off each other about What It All Means. That’s your private conversation to have, and I wouldn’t dare intrude.
Vanilla Sky and the inevitable ensuing conversations are worth your time and trouble, and may even be worth a sleepless night or two. Not for me, though. It is now 12:21 AM, Saturday morning, December 15, 2001, and I am going to convert what I’ve written into HTML and post it on my website and see if anyone reads it or not. Then I’m going to sleep, and if I dream any strangely vivid dreams I will keep them to myself.