i'm glad we all agree that movie would have benefited from penelope cruz being a long long way away from it.
@tebus: i've seen and liked memento, it's actually one of the most clever movies i remember (heh) watching in the past 3-4 years. however, despite it being some ten times better than vanilla sky it didn't make me feel so troubled. the explanation at the end is... sad (in a good sense). and quite amazing.
@|ngenius: i totally love "the others" and i didn't make the connection although i knew about the other movie. thanks for pointing that out! now i think i can see things a little more clearly.
ok, what follows is an explanation of vanilla sky. i can't talk about this movie in any other way than by clarifying what's going on, while when you look at it the first time you actually have no idea about most of it. so the following is full of spoilers and you might want to watch vanilla sky once without knowing anything about it instead of reading this.
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david (tom cruise) is a young rich guy who inherited his father's publishing company at a young age. his parents died in an accident. he spends his days just being stupid, hanging around with a writer friend and having sex with - we can infer - a whole lot of pretty ladies including cameron diaz (julie). from the beginning we gather that as though he only sees her as a friend and a "fuck buddy", she's secretly harbouring feelings for him. at his birthday party, david meets a spanish girl (sofia / penelope cruz) and immediately falls in love with her. she had been brought to the party by david's friend (the writer, whose name i can't remember for the life of me), who's also kinda taken but steps back as david - being the successful one - always gets all the girls. julie also shows up at the party though she wasn't invited: sad and frustrated, she spies on david and sofia having a good time.
david ends up going to sofia's place, where they spend the night together, basically talking about each other. no making out. in the morning, as david leaves sofia's apartment full of new energy and a sense of purpose in his life, julie arrives in her car and admits she had been following david. while at first this freaks him out, david later agrees to get into the car with julie (possibly to go and have sex?) and they leave together. during the ride they start having a discussion, where julie seems to be obsessed by wanting to be something more for david than just the occasional fuck. she also reveals david's friend told her about the "fuck buddy" thing, and is extremely upset about it. through david's first unconcerned, then worried denial, julie loses her marbles and control of the car. they fall off a bridge.
aside from the interludes where david is in the psychiatric ward talking with a criminal psychiatrist (mccabe), the only scenes in this part of the movie that
do not belong to the reality of david's life are at the very beginning (a nightmare he's having while in bed with julie) and when he talks with sofia after the car-crash, in the woods. the latter could also be a nightmare, or part of his coma experience.
when david wakes from the coma (julie apparently didn't make it) he's badly disfigured, both his face and right arm are disgusting to look at. he revels in his misery for some time and doesn't want to see anybody. he grabs hold of the future of his publishing company as a reaction of having been threatened by the board of counsellors (who all want his share of the company) to be declared of unsound mind. apparently, there is no solution through surgery for his condition, and the only thing science can offer is some very dull-looking plastic mask.
then one day, driven by loneliness and the desire to recapture that last feeling of his life being on focus, david decides to go and see sofia. she seems quite happy he decided to show up again, and not that put off by his now freakish looks. they decide to go out together and they meet at night in a crowded club. david's friend is also there. him and sofia watch david approach them wearing the mask and seem kinda miffed by it. now, the whole scene at the club has a lot of unexplained psychology going on, so i'll just stick to the facts for now. sorry if they seem to make little sense.
david's friend tells him not to wear the mask and start acting like the old david did. then he adds that he's there because sofia wanted him to be and she's also thinking it's weird that david's relying so much on her seeing they only met once. david is crushed by this news and goes to the bar, ordering drink after drink. he watches, maskless, from the counter while sofia and his friend sort of dance the night away, without daring to approach them again. only when it's very late and sofia's already talking with an altogether different dude she probably met there at the club, he makes his move and tells her he wants to start from scratch. he makes her repeat a funny piece of dialogue they had back at his birthday party, where basically he had told sofia that julie was stalking him. while at first sofia likes remembering the episode, she then falls silent and doesn't want to tell why. the three of them leave and on the walk back to their cars/bikes david gets all bitter and starts biting at both sofia and his friend. at some point they both leave him shaking their heads. he hangs around for a while, then decides to run after them and sees them both just around the corner, kissing. he falls to the floor, unconscious.
that's where reality in the movie stops. david's real life after this point (which we only get to see much later on) becomes a living hell: he manages to wrestle the board for control of his company, but he loses the will to live and spends all his nights and days at home sulking. at some point he finds an interesting offer on the internet: a brand new company called "life extension" allows people to survive their own death through suspended animation, while they are subconsciously stimulated to dreaming a lifelike dream for as many years as they want. the dream can have any content the customer chooses and is constantly monitored by technical support. david signs a contract with "life extension", choosing as the moment in his life where the dream will begin to take over when he's dead, the morning after that very night at the club. then he od's himself to sleep and he dies. his body is put in suspended animation and the lucid dreaming (as he can control his actions) begins.
and that's what we see for the rest of the movie, without the knowledge of what exactly we are looking at.
when david wakes up lying in the street where he fell the night before, he finds sofia at his side. she takes him home, denies anything happened with david's friend, and they basically fall in love with each other all over again and start living together. soon the doctors tell david that a cure to reconstruct his face has been found. he's rather skeptical, but the operation goes well and his face is back to normal. things really seem to be perfect.
until one night david wakes up, goes to the bathroom and finds he's disfigured again. he screams, sofia screams, then he wakes up in his bed as if it was all a dream. a check in the bathroom reveals his face is normal again. but when he gets back to bed, there's no sofia lying there: there's julie. she keeps repeating she's sofia, but david won't believe her (how could he!) and ties her up to the bed, then calls for the police. however, it's him who gets arrested for beating the girl everybody now seems to think it's sofia. getting back home thanks to the help of the company managers, he finds all the pictures showing sofia now have julie in them instead, and it's still julie that welcomes him home, apparently willing to forgive him for beating her. later the same day david sees sofia instead of julie again, and somehow thinks it was just a momentary lapse of reason on his part. they start making love at night, and right at the point of climax sofia becomes julie again. he then grabs a pillow and suffocates her. after the pillow is removed, he sees sofia again.
david tries to hide from the law for a while and winds up in a bar. he's approached by a guy who tries to tell him to regain control of his life and understand that everything about him is following his command. he's part of the tech support for david's lucid dreaming, but of course david cannot be aware of that as he has no recollections of his own death. the guy is trying to instruct david on how to maneuvre the dream back into the direction he originally wanted it to go, since all the interpolations featuring julie that we have seen, merely come from david's subconscious and his feelings of guilt, or the trauma following the accident. he ignores advice and ends up being captured by the police and confined in a psychiatric ward, with his mask on (again, he sees himself as a freak and disfigured person), to talk to a psychiatrist as part of a trial for the murder of sofia. we see snippets from their dialogue throughout all the movie, even when david's talking about the pre-lucid dreaming events (which we should assume are real). however, the whole psychiatrist scenario is
also part of david's lucid dreaming.
david eventually puts the pieces back together and remembers about the contract he's signed with life extension. a brief visit to their building - also in the dream - clarifies the situation for the audience too, much like i did up till now. tech support shows up again and informs david that he can now either get back to the lucid dreaming and let them fix a glitch that won't allow his subconscious to speak up ever again, or choose to end it and get back from suspended animation to his life. even though 150 years have passed since he started lucid dreaming, and his face is still disfigured (as the surgery only took place in the dream), david chooses to get back to the real life, and the movie ends with him opening his eyes.
ok, i hope this clarifies the plot. there's a lot of stuff i left out (who the fuck is ellie, for instance?) but you have to see the movie (not just once) for yourselves if you want to discuss it.
i had exactly the same thought
