Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Ryan Gosling
Ewan McGregor
Naomi Watts
Janeane Garofalo
Bob Hoskins
Directed by:
Marc Forster
Among the pile of movies Josie and I rented last week-end was Stay. It's been a few times we watched it, but it's not a movie that you can absorb in a single viewing. It's a movie dense with symbolism and meaning and achieves to be (almost) free from any form of pretentious artistic wankery, which is quite an exploit for an intellectual modern drama.
Marc Forster (who also brought us The Kite Runner, Stranger Than Fiction, Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball) tells the tale of Henry Letham (Gosling), a young and tortured artist (I know, I know), who's plagued by ideas of suicide (OK, maybe it's a LITTLE pretentious). Henry is haunted by "what he has done", which has to do with a car crash and a girl named Athena (Liz Reaser). It's not clear and it's what the movie is about, finding what's on Henry's mind. Hey, I'm always up for a good mystery!
Along the road with us to help are Dr. Sam Foster (McGregor) and his also suicidal artist girlfriend Lila Culpepper (Watts), who strive to decypher the enigma that is Henry. Through his artistic endeavors, they will try to understand who he is and where is he going with that self-destructive, depressive phase. Amusing fact, Henry is an art student and is obsessed with a painter named Tristan Rêveur, who burned all of his work before committing suicide at 18 years old. That name might sound romantically French for anglophone viewers, but it's a very tacky, clumsy, glamrockish name. It's like he was named Brucie Dreamer. I couldn't help but chuckle at the shoegazing ecstasy his name was pronounced with every time.
The acting is a little over-dramatic and heavy handed I'll admit as much. Ryan Gosling, despite having an interesting, unique face for a young actor goes overboard with Shakespearean angst sometimes. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts are a displaying a little more skills despite being given stereotyped characters. Why do all the New York shrinks would be intellectual dorks that only get laid with beautiful insecure women because they are in their thirties and secure financially? The only character that stood out for me was the Janeane Garofalo cameo of Dr. Beth Levy, who took care of Henry before Sam. The young artist visibly pushed her to the edge of professional exhaustion and maybe even suicide. I appreciated to see the struggle of a powerful woman played with nuances and different shades of gray.
The strong point of Stay is in its graceful, almost balletic direction. It's very charged in every scene, but Forster's playfulness with the central intrigue keeps the movie flowing nicely. Not happy with arthouse scenes, Forster will deliberately mess with the structure of his movie to hint you about what's going on. From subtle editing twists to deus ex machina characters that predict the doom of Henry, Marc Forster sprinkles hints over his movie like a fairy sprinkles magic over Unicorn kingdom. Movie buffs will love Stay despite its corny approach to despair, but casual movie viewers will be rebuked by the surgery Marc Forster operates on the traditional movie structure and left confused. It's a strong, quite challenging movie, but it's also...yes...it's also pretentious and not accessible to every kind of viewer.
SCORE: 83%
