Stay

Ryan Gosling as Henry Letham in STAY. Photo Credit: Eli Reed.
™ and ©2005 by Regency Entertainment (USA) Inc., and Monarchy Enterprises S.a.r.l. All rights reserved.

 
“Stay,” directed by Marc Forster, is a bizarre and almost maddening film—in a good way. The movie begins as a tire blows out on a vehicle. It begins hurtling end over end down the length of the Brooklyn Bridge. Just as you’re trying to sort out what happened, time moves forward to a shot of Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling) sitting on the ground near the burning vehicle as sirens can be heard approaching from a distance.

As the shot closes in on Henry, it morphs into a shot of Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) in his bedroom. “Slept right through the alarm clock,” Sam notes. “Must have been the baby.”

“What baby?” asks Sam’s fiancée, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts). “Our neighbors are ninety years old.”

The shot then again morphs into Sam on his bike. Sam is standing in for Henry’s psychiatrist. We’re not particularly sure at this point about what exactly happened to Henry’s normal psychiatrist.

“It’s the other way around—the bankers are paranoid and the housewives are depressed,” says Sam to Henry as they talk in Sam’s office. Sam tries to get Henry to open up.

Did Henry set the car on fire, Sam wonders. “I don’t remember,” replies Sam. The shot migrates outside to a bench where Sam and Lila are sitting. Lila has vertical scars on her wrists. “They’re from another life,” she says.

On a train, Henry is recognized by a girl as he’s lighting a cigarette. A man on the train tells him to put it out. Henry extinguishes the cigarette on his arm. He’s an art student, and a rather talented one, as we discover from the paintings he’s provided to his favorite bookstore.

Henry visits Sam unexpectedly, to try to sort things out further. Henry apparently hears voices in his head. Sam tries to encourage Henry to describe the voices he’s hearing. What Henry writes down wasn’t in his head. “This is a real voice,” says Sam.

“Can you help me tell the difference?” pleads Henry.

The movie plays out much like a dream. As Sam exits a bathroom, a jump cut is incorporated. It’s not certain why, at this point. However, coupled with the matched shots that metamorphose from one to the other, these odd transitions and seeming lapses of time do have a point. Half of the engaging side of this movie involves figuring out what that point is. Gradually, the transitions and cuts become so disorienting as to be a bit irritating and, reminiscent of a gothic music video—yes, complete with a scene in the mandatory, creepy art exhibit.

The film could very well be a portrait of depression, or desperation. As much as I generally dislike films that are overreaching in their attempt to be visually-provocative or profound, maybe the disjointed and surreal world Henry inhabits is, in fact, the world as the clinically-depressed see it…. and if so, it’s important that I listen to what the imagery has to tell me. I might learn nothing from it, but I might at the very least understand and respect Henry’s apparent suffering.

Incidentally, we learn that Lila stopped taking her meds because they cripple her ability to paint. I felt as if the film were going for a “Sixth Sense” angle with the introduction of Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins). If you’ve seen the film or the trailers, you know why. However, even to compare it to Shyamalan’s supernatural thriller isn’t really revealing anything. Just before it merges onto that road, the plot diverges from movies like “The Sixth Sense.”

Instead, it becomes largely about Henry’s deep feelings of guilt. Of what, exactly, we will learn only as the story unfolds. We do know that Henry is counting down the days until he will commit suicide. But the degree to which that observation interests me as a plot point is several orders of magnitude smaller than what I’m seeing on the screen. Time eventually starts to fold in on itself, and while the mechanisms for conveying this sensation of anachronism aren’t as deftly constructed and arranged as in Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” they are, nonetheless, intriguing for their own sake.

As Sam learns more about Henry, he discovers a woman Henry seems to dwell upon may hold the key to everything. Surely, it’s evident that Athena (Elizabeth Reaser) is dear to Henry, as we see him standing outside in the rain, patiently watching as she moves with grace in a dance class. However, we have yet to completely understand the connection between Athena and Henry’s suicidal focus.

If I’ve been annoyingly cryptic it’s because the plot is structured in such a way that if I were to discuss it in any more depth, any one detail, it might set your mind to one or another possible explanation for what happens in this film. I personally maintain that it’s best if you go in, as I did, without very much prior knowledge… perhaps you’ll consider several possibilities, and perhaps all of them will be wrong. Maybe you won’t even find the answer you were hoping to acquire… but that’s not really the point of a film like this. It can be interpreted many ways.

Henry believes he is going to hell for what he did. But what did he do? As Lila puts it, somewhere toward the latter half of the film, “Can you imagine hating your life so much that you wanna bring a backup razor?”

Sam responds, “So what do I tell him?”

Lila suggests, “There’s too much beauty to quit.”

There’s a part of me that, fundamentally, understands what ultimately took place… there’s no question about that. If I dwell on that, however, this becomes a lesser film that, in between its rarely brilliant moments, falls back on editing trickery to achieve a sort of phony profundity incorporating overwrought metaphor… If I forgive these trespasses and try to put myself in Henry’s headspace, though, where things are still rather fuzzy, then I can at least believe the film has some larger purpose.

I’m not sure I understood the director’s intent with this movie, but I’m also not sure I want to… I’d like to keep ruminating on it…

Stay • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 99 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for language and some disturbing images. • Distributed by Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corp.