Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this movie deals with difficult issues (loss, suicide, depression) in unusual ways (fractured imagery, nonlinear narrative, morphing characters). Younger viewers may be mystified by the movie's resistance to making standard sense. It begins with a car crash, the camera spinning violently to suggest the perspective of an obviously traumatized rider in the car. The film also features some harrowing, nightmare-like imagery, including spiral staircases, "doubles" of people, and repeated scenes that make time and space seem disjointed. Two characters appear with head wounds that bleed profusely, a dog attacks someone's arm, a young woman is restrained by doctors, and several characters refer to suicide; one character discusses her attempt with razor blades and shows her scars, and another puts a gun in his mouth and shoots, whereupon the shot cuts away without showing the blast, but cuts back to show his bloody head on the pavement. An art history lecture features disturbing paintings by Goya (soldiers and bloodied bodies). One character falls down the stairs and hits his head, hard. Some women appear in tight clothes, a brief visit to a strip bar includes pole dancers, mostly in the background. Characters use profanity, smoke cigarettes, and drink liquor, usually in despair or in an effort to self-medicate.
Families can talk about suicide, as at least two characters attempt it. How do Henry's memories and dreams, and Sam's efforts to understand them, play tricks on the characters, and by extension, the audience? How does the movie represent loss and grieving?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Often evocative, sometimes audacious, and finally undone by an inelegant close, STAY is less interested in story than in impressions. Beginning with a terrible car wreck on the Brooklyn Bridge that leaves a vehicle in flames and young Henry (Ryan Gosling) stunned, the movie then invites viewers to put together how he came there and what such trauma can even begin to mean.
At its best, Stay is more like an art installation piece than a film. Though somewhat too fond of the morphing transitions and built atop a hoary concept -- a moment of death unpeels into multiple layers of experience, memory, and projection -- it does achieve an eerie reorganization of space (in particular, lower Manhattan), as well as a sometimes shrewd, sometimes nutty investigation of time, as a matter of faith, convenience, and construction.
This investigation begins following the frankly harrowing accident, as Henry walks to the camera, his face pushing into and seemingly through the frame to become the face of someone else, namely, Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), awaking from what might be a bad dream, and emerging into his own day. Sam wears a tweedy suit and vest to work, his pants too short, his ankles sockless, and his glasses teetering forward on his nose. He rides his bike to work, a facility where he's subbing for another shrink, Beth (Janeane Garfolo), currently home and shaky, suffering some kind of "breakdown." Sam's first patient is Henry, who resents the shift in treatment and suspects Sam's good intentions and maybe okay abilities are not up to dealing with his particular ailment.
Henry's concerns are at once well founded and not at all applicable, in part because his troubles elude naming -- except for his curt assertion that he means to kill himself on the coming Saturday night, at midnight. It's a threat and a promise, and Sam takes it seriously enough ("He's got it all scheduled") to consult with the facility's resident meds dispenser, Dr. Ren (B.D. Wong, his ever practical, wholly compassionate Law & Order: SVU character here barely transformed by a strange wisp on his chin) and his own live-in girlfriend, Lila (Naomi Watts). Sam's life is soon entangled in Henry's. They slip in and out of one another's existences and spaces, so trains they ride run past one another, and stairways they descend turn into Moebius strips or endless, echoing spirals.
Director Marc Forster is working from a script by David Benioff. Stay's obsession with loss seems of a piece with both their previous interests (Forster's Finding Neverland, Benioff's novel/screenplay for 25th Hour). 25th Hour remembered 9/11 by imagining a strangely nostalgic future; this movie also evokes 9/11 in its images of a broken New York, and is at once more hopeful and less believable. Its final images are so unlike what's come before that they feel tacked on, a resolution from nowhere that is, at last, unconvincing and daunting.
Families who like this movie might want to see similar explorations of psychic states and moments of death, including Jacob's Ladder, November, and 21 Grams, all R-rated.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentA brief scene in a strip bar, references to a sexual relationship between two romantic leads ("Take your clothes off"), but no explicit images; one character tries to seduce/kiss a colleague, but he tells her no. |
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ViolenceHarrowing car wreck (seen from different angles, a coupe of times), suicide attempt with a gun. |
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LanguageSeveral f-words, "damn," "hell." |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking, smoking, discussion of "meds" for depression and other mental illness. |
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