Review: Stay

Note: This review was contributed by James Rocchi.

Theaters have been crowed with ‘puzzle films’ for a while now – movies like Abandon, Jacob’s Ladder, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects. Stay, written by David Benioff and directed by Mark Forster, is yet another in the genre. Headshrinker Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) has a new patient, Henry Lethem (Ryan Gosling), who says he’s going to kill himself in three days time. This makes the Doc uncomfortable – especially as his girlfriend Lila (Naomi Watts) tried to off herself not too long ago.

Henry’s smart, moody and unpredictable. Sam’s only taking the case over because Henry’s original shrink is missing in action. But Sam feels ready for the task: “I’ve read your file.” Henry shoots back fast: “Can I read your file?” As Sam takes on the case, though, he starts having weird … visions ... that start haunting him and bizarre coincidences he can’t reconcile. If Henry’s parents are dead – as Henry claims – then who was that woman at Henry’s old address? Why does Henry keep flashing back to a car wreck on the Brooklyn Bridge? Why does Henry claim that Sam’s blind chess partner, Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins) is his deceased father?



The problems with Stay are two-fold. One is that the film’s style is so aggressively constructed – Forster morphs backgrounds around a character’s head to jump from scene to scene, for example; or a moment when McGregor walks towards a glass sliding door and the sliding glass reveals Gosling on a subway train – that we never really have any footing, any sense of there being a reality for us to question. The second – and more prevalent problem in misfire puzzle films like Stay – is the sheer and simple fact that in a movie where everything is, or could be, a clue, then nothing really matters. Early on, you notice suspicious groups of twins and triplets, all carrying brushed-aluminum briefcases – does that mean something? How about the fact that McGregor’s character seems to be wearing ankle socks with wool trousers, exposing his bone-white calves constantly?

What the audience gets, then, is not a film with a compelling narrative and fully-realized characters but rather a big, glossy showcase for clues and red herrings, like some existential version of “Where’s Waldo?” where we’re looking for the truth instead of a guy in a red stripey hat. Forster has a crackerjack cast – McGregor’s always watchable, and Watts is pure movie-star glamour – even with thick, ropey suicide scars on her alabaster wrists. As for Gosling, there’s a developing irony in his career that his best films are under-seen (The Slaughter Rule, The Believer) and the films people actually see him in (The Notebook, Murder by Numbers, Stay) demonstrate him pretty much slumming in glossy surroundings.

Benioff has to shoulder a lot of the blame, which is a pity; his adaptation of his own novel The 25th Hour is a work of minor brilliance, and I even liked his screenplay for Troy (anytime I can walk into a film about mythical events of the distant past and walk out thinking about that week’s headlines, I consider that a victory for the screenwriter). Benioff gets in a few nice, smart lines. When McGregor’s Sam confronts his fellow psychiatrist Dr. Levy (Janeane Garofalo) about her mixing pills and booze – “You can’t drink while you’re taking these!” – her response is a woozy, dry “Apparently, I can. …”

But then we go back to camera-shaking on loan from Pi (another great puzzle film) and visions on loan from Jacob’s Ladder (ditto) or a creepy kid who could have walked out of The Sixth Sense (again, great) and we see that Stay is a patchwork made of pieces we’ve seen before. I can pretty much predict the headlines for the various reviews of this film – “Stay Away,” “Stay at Home,” and so on – but after seeing it, I kept hearing the title not as a plea but as a half-hearted command, the kind of imperative you give a dog who doesn’t know any new tricks. Stay’s that kind of mutt – nice enough, and well-groomed, but without anything new to show us.