Words will not do justice to how bad this film is but that’s all I have been given so I will have to make due. I’d like you to get on board the stupid train and wander on down the irrelevant path to where the rubble of this film remains. Stay actually wobbles it’s so imbalanced. That’s incredible from a film that has Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling cast in the lead roles.
This is the story of Ewan as Dr. Sam Foster, a psychiatrist who takes over the counseling of a patient. That patient is Ryan Gosling as Henry Letham who acts, looks and feels crazy. Gosling does well in this part, which was nice to see after his turn in the dreaded film The Notebook. After the two characters are introduced we are shown that Letham is a bit suicidal. The rest of the film has Dr. Sam trying to save this doomed kid’s life. Naomi Watts (Kate Burton) is the gal pal of Ewan who also once attempted suicide so she’s giving him little pointers throughout. Big help there. None of this plays out particularly well at any point.
The issues with the film are abundant. It’s too long at 90 minutes. It would be too long at five minutes. In a film worth watching we should theoretically care about what is happening to the protagonists. Not the case here. Cheer for them to die, cheer for some explanations, it won’t matter at all; the film goes on. You’ll keep wishing you’d taken a nap or anything else instead of paying money for this travesty.
You probably are aware that filmmakers hold all the cards. We, the audience are in the hands of the script, the actors and the director. We willingly admit that we don’t know what’s going on until we are shown. Essentially, we submit. Stay revels in this fact. We get very little information to go off of to figure out what the hell is going on, and some of that information is misleading. Note to all future movies out there; if you are going to attempt this method you damn well better have a hell of a payoff; something that ties it all together, something that gives us that “ah-hah” feeling. Otherwise, you’ve just wasted everyone’s time. Stay wastes time – everyone’s time. It wobbles until the end, until it finally collapses under its own fleshy idiocy. This is a film that doesn’t respect the audience in the slightest, which is a terrible sin in my world of watching movies. The only thing that makes it better than November is the level of actors involved (did any of you see November by the way?).
If you are still reading this you must be a car crash fan. I pray you are not still considering seeing it. Don’t do it! Even if you survived, it I would guess something from this film might seep into your life in other ways. Like functional alcoholism.
Stay is nothing more than a film masturbation session from a talented director (Marc Forster); nothing more than a talented group of actors getting together for some practice. If you need one last arrow to sling think about this; Ryan Gosling is Henry Letham. Letham. Guess what else those letters could spell? SPOILER COMING… If you guessed “Hamlet” you win a big prize! This is what passes for clever in this death spiral. Avoid heavily and without hesitation.
