The Unmodded Atmosphere

2001's Vanilla Sky is really not a bad movie. Conceptually, it really doesn't improve on Abre los ojos, the 1997 Spanish movie of which it is a remake. But director Cameron Crowe brings his natural knack for relationship dialogue to the sci-fi premise and the film's cast is certainly terrific. In addition to the main cast including Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, Kurt Russell, and Jason Lee, it seems like every bit part is someone interesting. Tilda Swinton and Timothy Spall have supporting roles and then Michael Shannon and Alicia Witt both make appearances.

So much time had passed since I last watched it. I saw it with Trisa on New Year's Eve when it was first in theatres. When we came out of the movie theatre, 2001 had become 2002. We agreed it was refreshing to see an intellectually stimulating film. I still appreciate this quality of it though now I can much more clearly see its influences. It rests on the bedrock of Vertigo, of course. The main character's fear of heights would seem a non-sequitur otherwise, for how little bearing it has on the story. There're also the big posters of Jules and Jim and Breathless, both films which were influenced by Vertigo.

Tom Cruise plays David, a spoiled rich man whose life is torn apart by the competing gravitational pulls of two women, played by Cruz and Diaz. Diaz plays Julie, a girl with whom David has settled into a comfortable routine of casual sex despite lacking any true affection for her while Cruz plays Sofia, a recent acquaintance. He never gets more than a kiss from her but the promise of a relationship with her dominates his imagination. This is similar to the two women in Vertigo. There's Midge, the Barbara Bel Geddes character with whom James Stewart's character, Scottie, has a comfortable and frank relationship, and Madeleine, the woman who excites Scottie's imagination but who is both within his grasp and also as unobtainable as a mirage.

Cameron Crowe is so good at capturing the chemistry of flirtation and he also knows how to make it go sour. The dialogue between Cruise and Cruz after the car accident that disfigures him is so perfectly, painfully awkward. They're too early in a relationship for all the emotional baggage he wants to hang on her and she's clearly uncomfortable confronting the limits of her own empathy. There's a karmic appropriateness that David becomes the obsessed, clingy lover after Julie had been the same to him. But Julie's idea of love was based entirely on the physical while David's is based entirely on imagination, on "delaying pleasure" to dwell in the anticipation. Arguably, Julie's conception of love is the more realistic, yet it seems ugly to think of love as just physical familiarity. This is the conflict between physical and sensual that runs from Vertigo through the French New Wave movies.

Cameron Crowe very clearly comes down on the side of the sensual with Sofia. I've always felt he shouldn't have tipped his hand so much in the last act of the film. But I do like how much the sci-fi aspect contributes to the ultimate mystery of reality.