Every week, moviegoers are polled by a company called CinemaScore to see how they like new movies in theatres. Their opinions are averaged out, and the film is assigned a letter grade. If the movie scores in the A-range, it will likely prove to be at least a decent-sized hit. Movies scored in the B-range usually do mediocre business, although there have been plenty of hits that have scored this way, too – it might just mean that the movie inspires strong feelings, with some people loving it and others not. Anything below a C-rating is a disaster, unless it’s a horror movie, because for whatever reason, even hit horror movies typically have underwhelming CinemaScore ratings. Only 22 films have ever gotten an F, but a D rating is considered the kiss of death for your film, with Joker: Folie a Deux recently scoring a dreaded D. Only one movie that scored lower than that has ever grossed $100 million – and that movie is 2001’s Vanilla Sky.
But wait a second, you might be asking yourself… doesn’t everyone love that movie? Nowadays, yes, they mostly do, with the film a favourite among many Tom Cruise fans, who maintain that it features one of his greatest-ever performances. But, during the holiday season of 2001, during an especially fraught time – coming just months after the devastating 9-11 attacks, audiences wanted escapism when they went to the movies, not a deep, probing journey into one man’s psyche – even if it happened to star Tom Cruise. Thus, when they turned out to see Vanilla Sky, expecting an upbeat Tom Cruise movie, they revolted, only for those same people to help turn it into a major cult hit once it hit DVD, and eventually came to be regarded as a classic.
Vanilla Sky is a remake of a Spanish film called Abre los ojos, which translates as Open Your Eyes and was the toast of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Tom Cruise happened to be there that year, saw the film, and optioned the remake rights with producing partner Paula Wagner. Cruise’s career was at an interesting point at the time. The star was absent from screens in 1997 and 1998, with him spending fifteen months shooting Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which is a project he devoted himself to so entirely he didn’t take on any work for about two years, despite arguably being at the peak of his fame. When he returned to screens, it was in an against-type supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. However, the action spectacle of Mission Impossible II quickly reestablished his box office dominance, and soon he was once again arguably the world’s biggest movie star.
At the same time, he’d struck up an amazing creative partnership with writer-director Cameron Crowe on their smash hit, Jerry Maguire. In the wake of that movie’s success, Crowe got his passion project, Almost Famous, financed by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKG. Despite critical raves, the movie was surprisingly unsuccessful at the box office, earning just over $30 million in North America. Enter Tom Cruise, who was keen to reunite with Crowe on a remake of Open Your Eyes, inviting him over to his house to watch the original film. Sensing its potential, Crowe, a true auteur, would not only direct but also write the screenplay, which would be closely patterned on the original.
When asked why he’d do a remake, Crowe, in a perceptive moment, compared what he was doing to a band covering another band’s song. Rather than depart from the material too drastically, Crowe opted to make the film a faithful remake, with certain shots in it being direct adaptations – such as the famous opening where Cruise’s character runs through an abandoned Time’s Square, being a direct riff on a scene in the original, where the lead character runs through an abandoned Madrid.
Crowe would go even further than that. When casting the movie, he opted to have star Penélope Cruz reprise her role as the lead love interest, a dynamic young woman named Sofia Serrano.
The film would mostly follow the story beats of the original, with Cruise playing David Aames, a privileged, handsome playboy who owns a Conde Nast-style publishing empire (in fact – Aames Publishing was actually shot at the Conde Nast headquarters). Aames busies himself with a string of affairs but one day finds himself beguiled by a woman dating his best friend Brian Shelby. It seems they could fall in love. Yet, before they can start a relationship, Aames winds up in a disfiguring car accident caused by a spurned lover Julie Gianni, played by Cameron Diaz. This leaves him scarred until a surreal operation can cure his appearance. Yet, while outwardly cured, Aames starts to seemingly go insane, having a hard time separating what’s real and what’s not, with the film framed by his prison confession to a psychiatrist, played by Kurt Russell.
While this is similar to the original, Crowe would imbue the film with his own perspective, turning the movie into somewhat of a pastiche of American pop culture from the sixties and seventies, the eras in which our hero, played by Cruise, came of age, and influence the chunks of the movie, as we learn late in the film, are supposed to be a simulation. Likewise, the impeccably crafted soundtrack is a serious selection of one banger after another, including everything from The Beach Boys to The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, an original song by Paul McCartney and Sigur Ros, whose guitarist, Jonsi, would later become Cameron Crowe’s regular composer after he split with his wife Nancy Wilson, of Heart, who composes the terrific score for this.
One of the reasons the movie strikes a chord with audiences more now than it arguably did in 2001 might be that Tom Cruise means something different to modern audiences than he did in 2001. Cruise is one of those stars who seemed to emerge fully formed. Still, throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he was always, above all things, a romantic lead and kind of the all-American ideal of the perfect man, a thing which likely made his casting in such a bizarre, surreal movie like this tough-to-swallow for audiences at the time. While he’s still a gigantic star, we idealize him less now, with him having had his ups and downs throughout his career, which came to a head in the 2004-2005 period, when his Scientology advocacy became controversial. He was able to bounce back, but notably, outside of his re-teaming with Cameron Diaz in Knight and Day, he never again played a real romantic lead in a love story, with him focusing primarily on action films, a genre he rarely toyed with during his heyday.
All this actually makes Vanilla Sky play a little better than it might have back in 2001, where, in the wake of 9/11, audiences wanted escapism. Yet, the film is a masterpiece, and Cruise delivers the performance of a lifetime as the spoiled but sympathetic Aames. Again, it’s one of those parts only a guy like Cruise can play, as he has your sympathy no matter what. Hollywood has never had a romantic lead like him since, with guys like Jake Gyllenhaal or Chris Evans sometimes trying to make old-school, Tom Cruise-style movies like the former’s Love and Other Drugs or the latter’s Pain Hustlers. In these movies, they play unsympathetic characters you’re nonetheless supposed to root for and like, but they can’t pull it off. Cruise could have. Heck, he made you love Frank TJ Mackey in Magnolia, and he’s a RABID misogynist. Cruise is Cruise, and there’s no one else like him.
What’s also interesting about Vanilla Sky is how lavish it is for a psychological thriller. There’s absolutely no way an actor nowadays would have the kind of clout Cruise wielded twenty years ago, with him not only being allowed to shoot at Conde Nast but also arranging for Times Square to be shut down and abandoned so they could film the famous sequence where he runs through an abandoned New York. That isn’t CGI. That’s Cruise, baby. He even gets Steven Spielberg, his buddy at the time, to show up as himself in a party sequence. Spielberg later cast Crowe himself in a cameo in Minority Report as a bit of quid pro quo. The film also allowed Crowe to reunite with some of his Almost Famous cast members, Jason Lee and Noah Taylor, who have prominent roles as David’s friend Brian and the mysterious Edmund Ventura. The movie also gave Tilda Swinton one of her first significant parts in an American movie, while Michael Shannon also has a small role, which is more extensive in the alternate director’s cut, which has since been released on Blu-Ray.
While audiences initially didn’t respond to Vanilla Sky, Cameron Diaz’s performance as the unhinged Julie Gianni was highly acclaimed, with her earning several big award nominations, including nods from the Golden Globes and Critic’s Choice Awards. Many attributed the film’s surprising climb to $100 million as further proof of Cruise’s undeniable star power at the time, but even before it left theatres, it developed a cult. Perhaps the film’s biggest fan was a surprise, with the director of the original Open Your Eyes, Alejandro Amenabar being a noted fan of the film, saying, “When I learned, quite some time ago now, that Cameron Crowe was going to write and direct the film based on Open Your Eyes with Tom Cruise in the leading role, I felt honored. Now that I have seen Vanilla Sky, I couldn’t be more proud. Cameron has all my respect and admiration. Respect, for having plumbed the deepest meaning of the work. Admiration, for having sought new viewpoints and a fresh approach to the mise-en-scene, giving the film his own unmistakable touch. Vanilla Sky is as true to the original spirit as it is irreverent towards its form, and that makes it a courageous, innovative work. I think I can say that, for me, the projects are like two very special brothers. They have the same concerns, but their personalities are quite different. In other words, they sing the same song but with quite different voices: one likes opera, and the other likes rock and roll.”