This is a project of which it can be said without hesitation that everyone involved was at the peak of their egos.
Director Cameron Crowe, in a remake of an earlier Spanish cult movie, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), has chosen to tackle the eternal verities of life - love, loss, sex, magazine publishing and dealing with prosthetic make-up.
David Aames, played by Tom Cruise, is that most irritating of human beings - the one who has everything, even things like girls who really should belong to other people. His life is suddenly transformed when one of these trophy broads takes him for a ride in her car which ends unhappily. Aames then enters a nightmare world where he cannot separate reality from increasingly strange and bad dreams. The crux of the film is the relationship between Cruise and Penelope Cruz, which doubtless should gain added resonance because of their real-life affair.
The problem with the film is that this relationship resolutely fails to strike any sparks. Cruise effortlessly negotiates the early scenes of serenity and prosperity as only a man who was born to smirk could. His transformation into the man who has lost his looks gives the actor the chance to flex his muscles in the unaccustomed role of a shambling wreck. The Cruz character, however, fails to keep pace. Her range of expressions is limited to a big smile and a disappointed moue. When in doubt, she acts with her hair.
Then there is the problem of the plot, a complex meshing of real life, nightmare and waking nightmare. Somewhere in here is the clue to the whole affair, but as the film unwinds, it becomes hard not to wish that the man would either wake up or be dead.
Vanilla Sky
Cert: cert15
