Vanilla Sky
Cameron Crowe

Sandy Starr

Are you a culture geek?

No, I didn't ask whether you were cultured - which would imply erudition and profundity. I asked whether you were a culture geek. Do you have a near-photographic memory of pop, movie and comic book ephemera? Do you like lists? Do you define your emotional states in relation to a personal catalogue of songs and movie scenes? And does any of this ever worry you?

If the answer to most of the above is 'yes', then you have to see Vanilla Sky. Starring Tom Cruise and directed by one-time teenage rock critic Cameron Crowe, this infuriating, pretentious and brilliant film is aimed at the contemporary, culture-saturated individual. Having spent much of his life being paid to listen to music, Crowe poses the question: what if you died and went to Heaven, and God asked you what you'd done with your life, and all you'd done is listen to records?

Cruise plays a rich playboy who has inherited his late father's magazine-publishing empire, and runs it without any commitment or responsibility. He also treats girls without any commitment or responsibility, particularly his regular 'fuck-buddy' Cameron Diaz. When he meets another girl - Penéope Cruz - at a party, and becomes infatuated with her, Diaz gets angry. Diaz gives him a lift in her car.

At that point, the film launches into a bewildering sequence of dreams, awakenings, plot reversals and flash-forwards that lasts until the credits roll. Things are seemingly tied up neatly at the end, only for you to leave the cinema with the suspicion that you've been had. Unfortunately, Crowe lacks the kind of filmmaking mastery that would make his surreal puzzle as compelling as, say, the films of David Lynch. Which means that Vanilla Sky's endless twists and turns soon get annoying. But there are enough ideas in the film to make it worth sticking through - and to then make it worth seeing a second time.

Vanilla Sky's theme is shallowness. Can a series of shallow experiences - shallow sex, shallow pop music, a cursory glance at a Monet painting - ever add up to a worthwhile life? Recurring motifs, such as an expressionless mask, a smashed-up guitar assembled in a display case and Conan O'Brien's trashy talk show, drive the rather depressing point home. Since the 1960s, juvenilia such as pop music has had adult credibility. But deep down, the pop consumer is aware that their life lacks something. Vanilla Sky is an expression of that angst.

In the film, Tom Cruise plays an unscrupulous yuppie confronted with his own shallowness. We have been here before - in Eyes Wide Shut he was a doctor with adulterous fantasies (never consummated), and in Magnolia he was a misogynistic stud (eventually reduced to tears).

Back in the 1980s, when Cruise starred in films such as Top Gun and Cocktail, he was unapologetically macho. Today, his six-pack and designer stubble contrast, to increasingly ridiculous effect, with his short stature and plasticine nose. In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise confirms his place as a film star for the twenty-first century: guilt-ridden and self-conscious.

I should mention that Vanilla Sky is - appropriately, given its pop collage theme - a remake. The original was a 1997 Spanish film called Abre los Ojos. And Penelope Cruz played the same role in the original as she does in the remake - how postmodern, darling.

Vanilla Sky's unique power comes from the contrast between the fluffiness of its pop ingredients and the darkness of its underlying message. The film illustrates a point made by Andrew Calcutt in his book Arrested Development: Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood: 'the erosion of adulthood, and the absence of a plausible image of history-making activity, cannot be remedied merely by the invention of a new self-image or the re-presentation of an old one' (p251). Pop cannot transcend itself.

At the age of 44, Cameron Crowe has finally grown up.