Cinema
Vanilla Sky (15, selected cinemas)
Bland but vast
Mark Steyn
Somehow Tom Cruise has managed to follow the debacle of Eyes Wide Shut with Brain Wide Shut. What the hell was he thinking? Vanilla Sky would be one of the dumbest movies of all time with any old Tom, Dick or Harry in it — Tom Jones, Dick Cheney, Prince Harry — but it's the presence of Tom Cruise that makes it especially bad. As it's his company that produced it, one can assume that making Tom look even more of a plonker than Kubrick made him look was not the intention. Admittedly, Tom and his beloved homonym Penelope Cruz have more sexual chemistry than Tom and Nicole in Eyes Wide Shut, but then so would Tom and a stale Eccles cake.
The title refers to the 'vanilla sky' of Tom's Monet, which hangs next to his Joni Mitchell. She paints, if you didn't know. 1 can't say whether Monet's made any CDs, but, if he has, you can bet David Aames (Tom) has one somewhere in his duplex in the Dakota Building. No matter how aptly 'vanilla sky' sums up the Monet, it encapsulates this picture even better: bland but vast. The theme of the film is, on the one hand, disfigurement and, on the other, trying to figure what all diss meant. David Aames is a young swinger who's inherited his parents' publishing company and has had great success with a men's mag bearing the tumescent title of Rise. Within the space of 12 hours, he meets the love of his life and is left hideously maimed. Thereafter, he finds himself confronting a recurring problem: he goes to bed with Penelope Cruz but wakes up with Cameron Diaz, or, alternatively, he goes to bed with Cameron and wakes up with Penelope.
This is a problem? Apparently so. Julie (Cameron) is merely his 'fuck-buddy% a phrase I last heard in a cinematic context as Cole Porter's affectionate term for Monty Woolley, star of The Man Who Came to Dinner and Cole's cruising partner. But enough cruising, back to Cruise. Whereas Julie is casual sex, Sofia (Penelope) is intense non-sex. They meet and talk in that heightened Hollywood banter that usually leads within a minute or three to heaving oiled bodies grinding away to some frightful power ballad. But, in this instance, they just keep bantering, all night: David, it seems, likes to delay pleasure, to heighten the sensation. So you can imagine his confusion when Sofia turns into Julie and vice-versa. Especially as one of them is supposed to be dead. But maybe she's not. Maybe the other one is. Or maybe neither of them are. Or maybe David is. Or maybe the film is.
But don't worry about it. The really important relationship in this film is between Tom Cruise and his face. That's clear from the opening, when he wakes up, bounds into the bathroom, peers into the mirror, plucks out a lone grey hair and then goes out into the street to discover that New York is entirely empty. There's a marvellous shot of him running through an absolutely deserted Times Square, horrified that there's no one around to admire his face. This turns out to be a dream. Or maybe a dream within a dream. Or maybe But never mind. The point is Tom gets hideously disfigured. Well, not that hideously. His left side's been pulled up a bit and his right side's been tugged down and there's a vague sort of diagonal seam like he's been sleeping face down on an old shoe-lace. He looks like a Spectator editor staggering back from a four-hour lunch: it's not exactly Phantom of the Opera. And so, instead of emphasising his pain, it only reminds you of his narcissism, and the movie's weird feeling of being an act of sycophantic reassurance to its star and producer. Nonetheless, after his disfigurement, he can feel people recoiling everywhere he goes. They're thinking, 'Oh, my God! Look at Tom! Until he lost his pretty-boy face, I had no idea what a terrible actor he was!'
If I understand correctly, this is the film's heartwarming message: Take Tom Cruise at face value, or not at all. Right now I'd say the real problem is not Tom losing his looks but keeping them: now 39 going on 17, he hasn't changed since Cocktail; sometimes you can be too boyish. But, even as you're pondering this, the movie drifts into weird cryogenised-Scientological-cyberfantasy territory with Tilda Swinton as customer-service representative of some eternal life corporation, and in its last halfhour the whole thing goes haywire. Cameron Crowe directs, very clumsily, but Penelope Cruz's fractured English is utterly charming. She played this role before, in the Spanish original Abre Los Ojos, and the guy in the Cruise part was a real heel, not just a yuppie charmer. Between this and Eyes Wide Shut, Tom seems determined to work through his mid-life crisis on our time.
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