7 / 10
Official trailer
An Empty Times Square
The film’s most famous image comes early. David Aames, played by Tom Cruise, drives his car through Times Square on a bright morning and finds it completely empty. No people, no cars, no noise. He gets out and runs through the silent streets in panic. Then he wakes up.
The production really did clear Times Square for the shot, early on a Sunday morning, and it’s a spectacular, haunting image. It sets the tone for a film that’s constantly blurring the line between dream and waking, and between what David wants and what’s really happening to him.
Vanilla Sky infuriates plenty of people, and I get why, but I like it a lot more than most of its critics do. It’s lush and moody and swinging for something big, and it keeps tripping over its own cleverness. When it connects, it unsettles me in a way few studio pictures even try. When it misses, it bores me. Cameron Crowe directed it in 2001, remaking Alejandro Amenábar’s Spanish film Open Your Eyes from 1997, and it’s the strangest, most ambitious film of his career by a long way.
David Aames
David is a spoiled, handsome, wealthy publisher who inherited his father’s company and treats life like a party. He sleeps with Julie, a free-spirited friend played by Cameron Diaz, who takes their casual arrangement more seriously than he does. At his own birthday party, he meets Sofia, his best friend’s date, played by Penélope Cruz, and falls for her in a single night of talk and sketches.
Cruise is well cast as a golden boy who’s never once had to face the consequences of anything he’s done, and he’s charming and a little unbearable in the early scenes. As the film goes on, and David’s life collapses, Cruise gets to play fear, rage and confusion, and it’s one of his more interesting performances.
For Writers
David’s arrogance in the early scenes makes him hard to like, and yet Crowe asks the audience to invest deeply in his suffering later on.
A protagonist who starts out unlikable can grow into sympathy, but the early scenes need to give the reader some reason to stay. A flash of vulnerability, a hint of loneliness or a moment of kindness can carry the reader through the arrogance until the character earns something better.
Crowe gives David the birthday-party scene with Sofia, where he’s open for the first time. It’s the thread the audience holds onto through everything that follows, and without it the rest of the film wouldn’t work.
The Crash
The morning after he meets Sofia, Julie offers David a ride. She’s hurt and furious, and she drives her car off a bridge with both of them inside. Julie dies. David survives, but his face is badly disfigured.
Cameron Diaz is terrific in her short role, playing Julie’s hurt and rage with a raw, unstable intensity, and the crash is shocking. From here, the film changes. David, hidden behind a prosthetic mask, becomes bitter, paranoid and desperate, and his relationship with Sofia turns painful as he struggles with his new face and his fading grip on reality.
Penélope Cruz
Penélope Cruz plays Sofia, the same role she played in the Spanish original, and she’s luminous: warm, playful and a little mysterious. She’s the light David is chasing through the whole film, and their first night together, talking, drawing and falling for each other, is one of the loveliest sequences Crowe ever directed.
That first night is my favorite stretch of the film. Nothing happens except two people talking and sketching, and it’s the most alive Crowe’s camera ever gets. It’s also why the rest works for me, because I believe David would tear his life apart trying to get back to that night.
She’s also the key to the film’s puzzle, because as David’s world slips out of shape, Sofia starts turning into Julie, and he can no longer tell who’s who or what’s real.
The Mask
As David’s life grows stranger, he’s arrested for murder and questioned by a prison psychiatrist, played by Kurt Russell, while wearing a blank, eerie mask. The interrogation scenes, interspersed with flashbacks, give the film its structure, as David tries to piece together what happened and the psychiatrist tries to decide whether he’s insane.
Kurt Russell is excellent, calm and sympathetic, a decent man trying to help a patient who may be a killer, and his scenes with the masked Cruise are among the film’s most unsettling. The mask itself, smooth and expressionless, becomes a symbol of everything David is hiding, from others and from himself. Something is very wrong, and neither man knows what.
Lucid Dream
The answer, when it comes, is pure science fiction. After the crash, David signed a contract with a company called Life Extension, which cryogenically froze his body and placed him in a lucid dream, a perfect virtual life of his choosing. Somewhere along the way, the dream went wrong, and his subconscious has been turning it into a nightmare.
It’s a big, strange twist, and it divides audiences to this day.
Some find it brilliant, a philosophical puzzle about reality, choice, grief and regret, with echoes of The Matrix, released two years earlier. Others find it a cheat, an explanation that makes everything before it meaningless. I think it works better on a second viewing, when you can see how carefully Crowe laid the clues, from the paintings to the songs to the sky itself.
For Writers
The film’s twist reveals that much of what we’ve seen is a lucid dream gone wrong. The reveal reframes everything, and it divides audiences.
A twist that changes the nature of reality in a story is risky. If it’s well planted, it rewards the reader with a new understanding. If it isn’t, it feels like the writer pulling the rug out, and readers resent it.
The test is whether the twist makes the story richer on a second reading.
If readers can go back and find the clues, the twist is fair. If they can’t, it’s a cheat, and no amount of explanation in the final act will fix it. There’s more on this in my article on plot devices that work and those that wreck a story.
The Sky
The title comes from a Monet painting David owns, and many of the film’s dream sequences are painted in its colors: soft, rosy skies that look like they came straight from a canvas. The visual idea is gorgeous, and it tells the attentive viewer that David’s world has become something painted, something unreal.
The soundtrack is another pleasure: Radiohead, R.E.M., Sigur Rós, the Monkees, Peter Gabriel and a title song by Paul McCartney, nominated for an Oscar. Crowe, a former music journalist, uses songs the way other directors use dialogue, and the music does much of the emotional work.
For Writers
The dream sequences are painted in the colors of a Monet sky, a visual clue that David’s world has become unreal.
Visual or sensory motifs can signal a shift in reality without a single word of explanation from the narrator. A color, sound or image, repeated in key moments, trains the reader to notice when something is off. Choose a single sensory motif to mark a change in your story’s reality, and use it consistently. Attentive readers will catch it, and everybody else will feel it. Crowe’s pink skies are a lovely example: most viewers don’t consciously notice them until someone points them out, and then they can’t stop seeing them.
The Leap
The film ends on a rooftop, with David facing the choice between returning to the real world, over a century in the future, or staying in his dream. To wake up, he has to leap from the building, and face whatever’s waiting for him in the real world.
The finale is powerful and emotional, a rare moment where the film’s big ideas and its emotions come together completely. Cruise plays it with real fear and hope, and the last line, an instruction to open your eyes, sends you out on a strange, uplifting note.
The rooftop is where the film gets its 7 from me. All the puzzle-box business finally turns into a feeling, and Cruise sells the terror of that jump so well that I stop worrying about whether the science fiction adds up.
The Remake Question
Open Your Eyes is the better film: tighter, darker and less showy. Crowe’s version is bigger, glossier and more self-indulgent, full of pop-culture references and celebrity cameos. It’s also more emotional, and the soundtrack and visual ideas give it a dreamy, romantic quality the original lacks. Watching both is worthwhile, ideally the Spanish one first. Cruz’s performance in each is compelling, and seeing how two very different directors handled the same story is a lesson in style.
Crowe After Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe made Vanilla Sky right after Almost Famous, his warm, autobiographical film about rock journalism, and after Jerry Maguire, his first film with Cruise. Everyone expected another heartfelt romantic drama. Instead, he made a dark, confusing science-fiction puzzle, and plenty of his fans were baffled.
Looked at now, it’s clearly a Crowe film anyway. It’s obsessed with music, with romantic longing and with a man learning to take responsibility for his life.
The science fiction is the frame. The heart is the same as Jerry Maguire’s: a selfish man discovering what matters, and paying a price for learning it too late.
Brian
Jason Lee plays Brian, David’s best friend, a struggling writer who brings Sofia to the party and loses her to David in a single night. He’s funny, generous and secretly heartbroken, and he’s the most likeable person in David’s world. His scenes have a small, sad truth about envy and loyalty between friends.
Brian is also the friend David takes for granted. He’s generous with David even after losing Sofia to him, and David barely notices. The film’s line that the sweet is never as sweet without the sour sums up what David has to learn, and Brian seems to have understood it long before his friend does. The part is small, and Lee makes it count.
Too Clever by Half
My complaint with Vanilla Sky is that it’s too long, too cluttered and too pleased with its own cleverness. The plot’s explanations get muddled, and the final act spends a long time explaining what the audience has already worked out. Some of the dialogue is glib, and David is hard to care about in the early scenes.
The long explaining in the final act is the part I’d cut hardest. It keeps going well after I’ve worked everything out, and it drains the mystery the film spent so long building. Crowe trusts his pink skies and his songs to tell the story everywhere else, and I wish he’d trusted them here. It’s still a bold, beautiful, strange film, far more interesting than its reputation, and it rewards a second look.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Inside a puzzle box, Vanilla Sky tells a love story, and asks the audience to piece together what’s real alongside its hero. When it works, the confusion is deliberate and thrilling. When it doesn’t, it’s just confusing.
Stories that play with reality need a strong emotional anchor, so the reader has something to care about while they’re figuring out the rules.
If your story blurs reality, keep one relationship clear and true through the confusion. It’ll keep the reader invested while the rest shifts.
Open Your Eyes
I give Vanilla Sky a 7 because I love what it’s reaching for and get impatient with how long it takes to get there. Penélope Cruz at her most luminous, that empty Times Square, the Monet skies and the soundtrack carry me through the clutter, and the rooftop ending pays off the wait. The endless explaining and a twist that asks a lot are why it stops short of an 8. It’s better than its reputation, and it rewards a second look.
