Movies That Settle: Vanilla Sky

Twenty years later, does it hold up? Did it even hold up then?

It’s been awhile since I did one of these, but I recently had a fun revelation that helped me decide to take on another movie. After emptying our storage unit, I discovered my CD album, not touched in several years and buried in a box. Most of them I had figured were lost or sold, and since I didn’t have anywhere to play them, I wasn’t losing any sleep over it. However, a couple years ago, I inherited my mother’s car, which has a CD player. Because I stopped paying for music subscription services and got tired of ads, I thought it would be fun to go a little retro and listen to CD’s. So, the re-discovery of this book of CD’s was actually quite a fun twist of fate. I actually want my next car to have a cd player!

One of the CD’s in there was the Vanilla Sky soundtrack, which I think I bought at the time because it had a heretofore unreleased R.E.M. song, plus a few other nuggets that I didn’t own (Back then, owning music was a lot more important to me.) Listening to the music brought back some memories of the movie, which I had not seen in years. I found myself not really remembering what the point of the movie was, and what really happened at the end. I brought it up to my wife while we were in the car listening to the soundtrack, and she called it “a low-key horror movie.” I had never thought of that before, but I guess it could be one of those psychological thriller-type ones. But there is a lot going on here that doesn’t even seem to get wrapped up by the end. So, how does it settle twenty years later?

In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a re-make of a Spanish movie, Abre los Ojos (Open your Eyes, also starring Penelope Cruz, as it were), although I’m not sure if the main character in the original is as unlikable as Tom Cruise is in this one. Basically, Cruise plays David Aames, rich jerk. David runs a few magazines back when that was something that people did. He inherited the magazines and a whole publishing company from his father, who also appointed a board of directors to babysit him. The Board apparently wants him gone, but that’s one of those never-resolved threads that really is just there for David to be paranoid about. At the beginning of the movie, David wakes up in bed next to Cameron Diaz, who plays Julie Gianni, a beautiful girl who is obsessed with him that he has very little time for. It is, in fact, pointed out by David’s best friend, Brian (Jason Lee), that she is his “fuck buddy,” which I believe was the first time I had ever heard that term, so that’s something. Brian is a writer that needs David to publish his book, but it is also established that he is unlucky in love, while his bestie uses one of the most beautiful women in the world as a “fuck buddy.” In fact, Lee brings Penelope Cruz’ Sofia to David’s birthday party, and David promptly snatches her right away from him. Basically, everyone in the movie except David and Sofia are total losers, and David treats them as such.

Well, there is one other character who isn’t really a loser, but that’s because he’s not even a character, and that is Kurt Russell’s psychiatrist. There are several intercut scenes between him and David, and Russell is questioning him about a murder that he is accused of, but we don’t know who he murdered and if he did it, and why he’s wearing this weird mask.

The mask bit is resolved soon enough because David and Sofia spend the night at her place, but it is established that they do not sleep together because David is a “pleasure-delayer.” Their banter is pretty ridiculous sometimes, but she does zing him, and kind of makes the whole movie seem pointless with one of her zingers, when she tells him, “Somehow, I can’t play the violin for you.” It makes you realize that he is just a rich, selfish putz that gets what he deserves.

Which is what, exactly? Well, Julie showed up at that same birthday party, uninvited, ends up dancing with the waiter, and follows David to Sofia’s apartment. She stalks him as he is leaving in the morning, and is a little angry because she obviously assumes that they slept together. Which would have been fine if he did, since they’re just “friends.” But this is where it gets weird. For one, Julie has some good points in their conversation, calling Sofia “Moth Girl” for flittering around David’s bright light, and in the real kicker, says, “She must be exhausted from trying to be witty for you all night long.” It really seems like everyone knows David’s faults but himself.

His real fault is getting in Julie’s car. She begins to drive a little fast and recklessly as she relates to him that their sleeping together established a bond, despite what he tells people about them being “just friends.” She in fact confesses her love for him, and actually brings up the “fuck-buddy” line, which leads David to think that Brian told her about their earlier conversation. Finally, in a desperate attempt to save him from… himself (?), she drives off an over-pass, mangling his face and killing herself. Maybe.

The next big chunk of the movie is David trying to get back with Sofia and complaining about his “facial prosthetic,” which he gets all pissed about, even though this guy should just be happy he’s alive. There is a weird scene after he finally goes to talk to Sofia and asks her out. They go to a club, which seems like an odd choice for a guy who is supposedly suffering from severe headaches due to the accident. Anyway, Brian is there to chaperone for some reason, and David gets mad at that and refuses to behave like a normal person. David then decides to get wasted with the bartender because Sofia doesn’t really want to talk to him and never tells him why. It is also well-established that they only met once, so who can really blame her?

Upon leaving the bar, Sofia separates from them and runs home. Brian and David have a little argument and and he brings up the Julie Gianni “fuck-buddy” comment again. Brian seems confused, saying he never talked to Julie, and wonders if he has been harboring this the whole time. Brian leaves him there and David proceeds to pass out in the street, with Visions of Brian and Sofia making out dancing in his drunken head. And after the way he acted, who could blame them?

The next morning, Sofia shows up under the vanilla sky (from the painting they admired earlier) and picks him out of the gutter and they are suddenly an item. Not long after that, his face is miraculously fixed, and there is a line about The Board being all cool with him now. Everything’s coming up Millhouse until he wakes up one morning and Penelope Cruz’s Sofia has been replaced by Cameron Diaz, who claims that she is Sofia. Cruz has also been replaced in all of the pictures by Diaz, even the sketch David drew of her earlier in the movie. David flips out, and apparently beats her up off-screen. He is arrested for the crime, then inexplicably released, but is shown pictures of the battered Sofia. Brian shows up, and David accuses him of colluding with The Board to get rid of him, pointing out that Brian now owns a fancy camera and new coat, thinking he was paid off. Brian then accuses David of taking the one girl that he wanted, and flatly tells him, “I was your only friend,” before walking away.

David then goes to a bar to apparently drink his sorrows and meets “Tech Support.” We find out that David is living a Lucid Dream. Sometime after the night at the bar, he went to a company called Life Extension and got cryogenically frozen and everything that we just watched for the last hour, after that bar scene, was his fantasy, with his subconscious creating that small Sofia/Cameron Diaz glitch, apparently. The good news was that all his ills can be cured and he could be brought back to normal life. The bad news was it had been 150 years and Sofia and everyone else is dead. So, if he chose, he could stay in the dream and live out a good fake life with Sofia that he believed to be real, or go back to real life and be miserable with everyone else. Oh, also, he is told that the future is quite different and his wealth won’t last long, which is pretty funny. Probably magazines weren’t really a thing anymore. Hell, it’s only been twenty years since this movie came out and magazines aren’t a thing anymore.

Still, he decides to leave his fantasy realm and go back to real life, I guess because it’s real. He conjures up Sofia because he can do anything, and he says a fake goodbye. Since it’s his fantasy, she tells him that they’ll find each other again, which is a nice, existential thought about love being eternal, but we know is crap, because he essentially made her say it. He then jumps off the roof and a female voice tells him to open his eyes.

This, I feel, is where the movie should start. Seriously, why did we just watch all that? The story I want to see is a thawed-out David living in 2151. Why do I care what this rich idiot dreamed about while he was frozen? I mean, if this were real, and some wealthy freak like Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos decided to freeze themselves upon their death, we would all be laughing our asses off at them. Yet, this movie wants us to think that this wealthy freak did it for love.

I guess in a way, I don’t blame David for going back to real life. All he had was the Tech Support guy’s word that he won’t start seeing Cameron Diaz’s face everywhere again. He is told that his guilt over how he treated her in his previous life caused him to screw up his Lucid Dream and bring her back, which was another direction the movie could have gone in and it could have been full-blown horror instead of just “low-key” horror. He is told that they fixed that glitch and he could go back to normal, old suspended animation, but we have all heard of scams like this, like a mechanic tells you your car is all fixed and then two days later, something else is suspiciously broken and you have to bring it back to get that new problem fixed. That should have been obvious even to a guy who has been asleep for 150 years, and let’s face it, wasn’t exactly a genius when he was alive. Either way, he jumps off the roof because he wants to live a “real” life.

So, at the beginning of the post, I mentioned that a lot of stuff doesn’t get resolved, and by the time David jumps off that roof, it’s still not. For one, Tech Support tells David that Brian, a “true friend,” threw him a huge memorial service, and everyone came and was sad. So, if Brian was his friend, I guess he didn’t tell Julie Gianni that she was just a “fuck-buddy?” I suppose she could have figured it out, but I think we’re supposed to believe that the term “fuck-buddy” was something that Brian kind of made up, so he must have told her. It’s pretty flimsy, but so is the plot of this movie. Also, during that memorial scene, Brian and Sofia share a wave and a nod, which tells me that they, too, probably only met a couple times and they never saw each other again. So the make-out vision and the fact that Sofia was acting so weird in the bar were nothing. And whatever it was that Sofia said she would tell David in the next life when they are both cats? We never found out what that was. Just another pointless red herring. For my money, even if Brian did date Sofia in the real world, well, good on him. He saw her first.

It’s also obvious after a little critical analysis that Kurt Russell’s therapist is only really there to establish that he is in fact not real, and by proxy, none of it was. In the final scene, David spirits him up, but when Kurt tries to explain that he is real by saying he has two daughters, he doesn’t actually know their names. I know that it’s to confirm for the audience that it was all fake, but within the plot, it renders all those scenes meaningless, because it was really all just David psycho-analyzing himself. I don’t know about most people, but I’m pretty bad at that.   

This is all to say that, twenty years later, this movie doesn’t hold up; because a lot of rich people have been exposed to be total douchebags, and one of them even got elected President. We actually don’t take a lot of them seriously anymore because they do dumb things like go into space just because they can. So why should we take David Aames seriously, just because he wanted to live a little longer? I should also point out that David chose to kill himself rather than live life as an ugly person who can’t romantically be with Sofia, even though the last time he saw her, she said, “Yeah, we’ll catch a movie or something.” Guess that wasn’t good enough. Honestly, the headaches seem almost like an afterthought that the screenwriters threw in to make David not seem so shallow. There is also brief mention of his arm being injured, but it’s never shown to hinder him in anyway. Without that, he’s just a selfish prick who treats people badly and is unable to handle it when one of those people comes to get him. They should have dropped the whole love story and just called it, “Karma’s a Bitch.”

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, everyone! Don’t forget to check out my linktree and enjoy your stuffing!