A self-indulgent and vain publishing magnate finds his privileged life upended after a vehicular accident with a resentful lover.
From the beginning of this film, I highly anticipated that given the Oscar-winning director’s capabilities and the star actor, Tom Cruise’s box-office draw, that this would be an incredible story, and I am sure that it was, but I just didn’t get it. The problem is that I had a very difficult time knowing when we were in dream mode and when we were in reality mode, which is relevant because that is the same issue that David Aames had. Tom Cruise stars as David Aames, a thirty-something-year-old who became heir to his father’s Magazine House. Since he and his father didn’t seem to have a great relationship, he appears to be highly confused and grossly ungrateful about how much of an asset he has within his reach.
Like most men his age, David desires to have a great relationship, and the two women with who he is involved, Julianna (Cameron Diaz) and Sophia (Penélope Cruz) are about as different as the day is long. Julianna is a stalker who envisions herself to be in a deep relationship with David, and Sophia has been drawn into the dysfunction of it by David who wants her to pretend that she and David have something going on so Julianna will leave him alone. Thinking this is a quick fix, Sophia agrees to David’s request and ends up falling in love with David while Julianna ups her stalker game and continues to be a nuisance that neither David nor Sophia can’t quite seem to break free from.
The plot twists even more dramatically when David ends up in a serious car accident while trying to break free of Julianna’s presence. The mask he wears to cover up the disfiguring scars on his face becomes a character of its own that also drifts between the dream world and reality. While David becomes more delusional, his therapist, McCabe (Kurt Russell), struggles with him to try to get him to understand that he has the key to his own fate. In the end, there is a murder and no one can quite figure out whether it is Julianna or Sophia who is dead, and David’s inability to clear his conscience only makes the crime harder to digest.
While Director Cameron Crowe did his due diligence in developing each of the characters into insufferable humans, it is still hard to digest the elements of dysfunction enough to understand the overall purpose of introducing the whole reality vs dreamworld concept and make it make enough sense to follow the storyline. While the whole love-gone-bad ritual is a common reoccurrence with relationships, recreating this entire medium of dysfunction for the sake of entertainment is too much to stomach.
Now available in a Limited-Edition Blu-ray™ as part of the Paramount Presents line
