When Calderon de la Barca wrote "Life is a Dream" some
centuries back, he could not have imagined that an entity called
Hollywood would expound many, many times on his theory and
throw images across the screen that would make off-off
Broadway stage productions of his play look neolithic. The latest
dreamer is Cameron Crowe who has given the American
treatment to Spanish filmmakers Mateo Gil and Alejandro
Amenabar's "Abre Los Ojos." Crowe is the guy for the job,
having written as a teen for Rolling Stone magazine and having
put his own novel, "Fast Time At Ridgemont High" on the screen.
Known for his hip style and for illustrating arresting characters
like Jerry Maguire, Crowe has now substituted the cool realism of
"Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" for an out-and-out surreal
adventure into the land of fancy--the expanse that every one of
us enters many times during a twenty-four hour period for better
or worse depending on what our subconscious evokes at night.
Like "Mulholland Drive"--which has more internal logical than
"Vanilla Sky"--Cameron Crowe's new film leads some
moviegoers to wonder "what was that all about?" and even Roger
Ebert had to go to his screening room twice before he could
make something of it. But if you treat the story as though it were
a morality play, you could see that Crowe is teaching his principal
character, the rich, handsome, popular, has-it-all, 33-year-old
David Aames (Tom Cruise) that he has not been treating women
well. The film's message, "Shape up" becomes clear by the
conclusion of the 135-minute drama, as Crowe takes us deep
into the man's interior faculties.
A good deal of the story revolves around the party lives of
yuppies, principally of David--who entertains gorgeous women in
his unbelievable condo and frequents some of the best clubs in
Manhattan where every female looks like the cover of
Cosmopolitan magazine and probably acts accordingly. David's
main squeeze at the time is Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), who is
enraged when David turns her out in favor of his new eye candy,
Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz). What's more he steals Sofia
away from his best pal, Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), giving him two
moral strikes right off the bat. What David has not anticipated is
the rage which his action fuels in Julie, so that by the time Julie
takes goes out of control while driving him around Manhattan,
seeming to forfeit her own life while leaving David inoperably
scarred, the hapless man apparently loses his mind and ends up
in jail for murder.
In the film's most stirring scene, Cameron Crowe pulls a David
Lynch with a knock-your-socks-off identity switch that will leave
you wondering what the heck is going on. It's no wonder that
David needs to undergo a series of psychoanalytic sessions with
dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell), who makes David realize that murder,
and not his dreadfully mangled face, is the real problem.
Tom Cruise smiles too much, as expected, but perhaps this
excessive showing of his teeth is evoked more by his character's
contempt for women than by actual happiness or good spirits.
When he cruises with Penelope and faces off with Julie, the
chemistry is there, all right, and while "Vanilla Sky" gives "Abre
los Ojos" the inevitable slick feel of Hollywood, taking away some
of the more earthy ambiance of the Spanish version, Crowe does
not ruin the latter in the way that George Sluizer wrecked his own
Dutch-French film "The Vanishing" by Americanizing it with a
happy ending. "Vanilla Sky" is among the more cinematic
offerings of the year, casting aside the dull naturalism of, say, a
"Joe Somebody" in favor of a moral exploration of an egotist's
subconscious terror.
Copyright © 2001 Harvey Karten
