Cruise plays David, an obnoxious, immature, cocky brat (don't hurt yourself stretching there, Tommy!), the type of guy who shows up to the publishing company he's inherited, perpetually late, in an untucked, half-buttoned shirt and jeans, and then wonders why the people who have been working there for years don't respect him. He's sleeping with Julie (Cameron Diaz) but calls her a "friend" (even though he doesn't invite her to his parties and pointedly reminds her of that when she shows up anyway -- ahhh, true friendship...). When his best friend Brian (Jason Lee, who I usually find grating, but here Cruise is so revolting that Lee actually seems likable), shows up with the beautiful Sofia (Penélope Cruz) on his arm, David promptly steals her away. Basically, he's a jackass, and yet we're supposed to be sympathetic to him. The only person who calls him on his shitty behavior is Julie, and Crowe makes her look like a raving psycho, half a step away from putting a rabbit in a pot of boiling water. I instinctively sympathized with Julie, but poor Diaz has to portray her as such an obsessive harridan that it's hard to maintain empathy. As she's informing David that his sleeping with her on a regular basis implies some kind of relationship (damn those hysterical, lunatic women!), she crashes the car they're in, as you've seen in the previews, leaving David with a mangled face and Julie dead ... maybe.
I'm not going to go into the rest of the plot, on the off chance that you (a) are planning to see the movie and (b) haven't paid any attention to the previews. Besides, explaining it would take almost as long as seeing it. Basically, it drags on for about two hours -- mainly showing us David being a jackass or getting upset over not being pretty any more -- before it starts to get twisted and weird in an interesting way. By then, though, it had exhausted my patience, I thoroughly loathed David (I scrawled angrily in my notebook at one point, "Why does he get a happy ending?"), and I just didn't care any more. And it stays weird and interesting for only about 20 minutes, and then the ending is a stupid, lazy cop-out. (It doesn't help that the mystery behind the confusing and contradictory things that have happened is revealed in a painfully slow, simplistic manner that makes the last 20 minutes seem longer than the preceding 2+ hours. I mean, there's this sequence at the end where Cruise looks at Kurt Russell for a long minute, then Russell looks at Cruise for a long minute, then we go back to Cruise looking at Russell with exactly the same expression on his face, then back to Russell looking at Cruise only now he's shifted an eyebrow minutely.... I kid you not, this went on forever. It was excruciating.) It just plain annoyed me, too, by being so poorly paced that at least a dozen times I thought it was about to end (I stopped counting after ten).
You can tell this is Tom Cruise's bid for an Oscar: he gets to wear latex scars on his face and talk like a stroke victim and show all kinds of emotions like "confusion" and "smiling" and "angry confusion." It's pretty pathetic that David's far more concerned about how his face looks than about Julie's death or even the wounds to his arm and leg. Despite his gorgeous apartment, beautiful girlfriend, and massive wealth, he whines that "my dreams are a cruel joke. They taunt me." No, asshole, what you did to Julie is a cruel joke. I saw his mangled face as poetic justice, a sort of Dorian Gray in reverse. (There are sort of two -- maybe more -- "realities" swirling around, one in which David's face is disfigured and another in which it isn't. So maybe it's like the portrait of Dorian Gray is out there walking around along with the real man.)
I used to like Penélope Cruz when she was in Pedro Almodóvar's films; she always seemed so serious and angelic. Then she started making American films, and suddenly she became a cutesy, simpering airhead. Even her character seemed like someone I'd automatically hate, the kind of woman who, if she saw another woman talking to a good-looking man, would flounce over to draw the man away just because she could. (Not that that's ever happened to me or anything.) I grimaced through the sex scenes between her and Cruise; forgive me if I don't take pleasure in two shallow, careless, pretty people having sex.
Even the writing, normally Cameron Crowe's forte, is lame. His characters spout pretentious babble; half the time I felt like I understood all the individual words in a speech, but together they didn't make any sense. Lengthy conversations between David and a prison psychologist (Kurt Russell, looking very old and gray) are insipid, rambling, and unenlightening. The publishing company's board of directors, who despise David and want to overthrow him, nickname him "Citizen Dildo" ... which doesn't even make any sense! I could see maybe "Citizen Dick," but I guess Crowe already used that in Singles. (Seems like he was trying to use it again without actually using it again -- in any case, it struck me as lazy, stupid, and meaningless.)
Normally I
enjoy films where you can't always figure out what's going
on, but -- and this is crucial -- I need to care about what's
going
on. Not only did I not care, this movie actually angered
me.
I was disgusted at the way David treats Julie, and I was waiting
throughout
the whole movie for someone other than Julie to take him to task for
it,
for him to realize his behavior and change -- anything that would
signal
growth and awareness. Instead, when he finally, at the very
end of the movie, admits he treated her badly... that's it. No
indication
that the realization has changed him in any way. No expression of
regret. He just kind of says, "Yeah, I didn't treat her well,"
and
the matter drops. Crowe has said in interviews that this
movie
is about taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions,
but
that's exactly what David never does: he never connects his subsequent
problems to the way he treated Julie. He just whines
self-pityingly
about how people are plotting against him, or how his face isn't pretty
any more, or why did this happen to him.
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