Mommy, is that man gonna die?
Added 9/30/2009
After seeing the protagonist Henry Lethan (Gosling) sitting beside a traumatic, fiery crash, the film collides into a patient and doctor relationship between Henry and his psychiatrist, Sam Foster (McGregor), sort of a creepy, foreboding version of the relationship between Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting combined with a little The Sixth Sense flavor. When Henry tells Sam about his suicidal plans to celebrate his 21st birthday in three days, Sam's attempts to save Henry lead to a mind-bending tale of regret, warped déjà vu, and altered consciousness.
Truly a visual masterpiece, Stay flows from one scene to another with creativity similar to interwoven scenes of a filmmaker's representation of an M.C. Escher painting. Blending in a wave of colors and transitioning from one scene to another with some great jump cuts and interesting visual quirks, the cinematography is a surreal dream reminiscent of the originality and innovations in films like The Matrix, Sin City, and Spun. Put it this way, in one red hue saturated, hallucinogenic bar scene, I would swear the filmmakers purposely cast Dr. Ruth and Salvador Dali look-alikes as bar patrons just to make the scene more bizarre. Every scene is an excuse to use color, lighting, shapes, angles, and various editing techniques to accentuate the storyline and express the artistic aspect of filmmaking. It's brilliant.
If you enjoyed the story and twist from The Sixth Sense, then Director Marc Foster's journey, his hybrid version of reality and illusion, is sure to please. And despite some reviewer's displeasure with the ending, I think it's a wonderfully cerebral, thought provoking conclusion.
Jason Elin
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Watch "STAY" and then watch it again and again...
Added 8/31/2009
This is a film that needs and deserves to be seen more than once. The first viewing you should just immerse yourself in it, absorb the imagery, feel with the characters. If you get confused, stay with it. Then when you watch it again you will start to understand the context and realize just how wonderful it is. It needs to be viewed this way because it takes place primarily inside a human mind processing its own life and death, moving in and out of various states of consciousness. In this world , thoughts become active characters.
It is important that you don't know this initially, so that you experience this reality the same way that Henry does. You must become confused as Henry does and become engaged in the search with him: the search for answers, meaning and ultimately forgiveness. This is the mind's reality and should be the viewer's as well. We can debate later on, if what the mind believes to be real is the true reality. The point is, it believes it to be real and it is real in the sense that it is it's sincere journey, embarked upon with honest fear, grief , guilt, and confusion, trying to make sense of it all .
So you follow Henry's journey, from various states of awareness. Henry's mind in one state, hears the voices and sees some of the faces of the people trying to help him. He pulls in these characters from the outside world ,and creates aspects of himself from them when he goes into a deeper sub-conscious state. Not being aware of what is inside and outside, (`I hear voices, can you tell me which ones are real",) he asks Sam, who enters his world to try and save him.
In this state, the human mind does not realize what characters are actually extensions of it's own personality. So we watch the story of Sam the caring psychiatrist, and Lila the post suicidal artist, who Henry has pulled from the outside world, and creates aspects of himself from them to help him save his life, but they are created from his mind not objective reality. In reality they are the two people closest to him as he lay dying on the street.
He brings these characters and others, into his deeper state, where they converge with the vivid imagery of Henry's past: his thoughts, memories, emotions and artistic perspective. This is a visually stunning world, that shifts often and in interesting ways, the way the sub-conscious works. For example, Lila reflects aspects of Henry's personality, in regard to his own fragile artistic persona, that is also suicidal, can't paint on meds, wonders if their art is any good and if they will be remembered. That they are one and the same is realized by Henry, only when Lila discovers that her art is signed by Henry and she runs to the fence. This is Henry starting to move back towards the conscious world.
The sub-conscious mind as playwright, has its own way of dealing with problems and what it sees makes sense, but it is in a type of code that the conscious mind must translate before there is discovery and understanding. But this is the true life and death struggle of the mind, and it is real. Unlike some gimmick in lesser work, that releases the writer from explanation, and makes the audience feel cheated, this is the authentic reality of the mind. So what you have watched has placed you inside the mind, and rather than detaching you, you have joined in the most intimate way, with another human being. What you come away with after seeing this film is who Henry is, but it is his sub-conscious mind that has told most of the story.
Henry decides that it is too late for him and accepts death. The suicide that occurs on the bridge, ironically jolts him back to life in the conscious world,("I have to wake up now"), where he sees the faces of Sam and Lila trying to help him. Sam tells him that the accident was not his fault, he was driving behind him and saw the tire blow out. This releases Henry from his guilt. My guess is that Henry felt he was to blame because he stopped taking meds so he could paint, and thought it might have affected his driving. (You get hints of that from other places in the film). But it is also from Sam that Henry learns that all the passengers are dead. . At this point , you come to the realization that Henry was driving with Athena,( who he was going to ask to marry him that night, because he had the ring), and his parents, when the accident happens.
As Lila speaks to Henry, he sees the face of his beloved and asks her to marry him. The kind Lila, (who is a nurse), holds him and accepts. Then Henry dies, joining Athena.
When Sam and Lila, (who do not know each other) move away from the body, a flash of Déjà vu occurs. Sam feels some connection to Lila and asks her to have coffee with him. It is possible that a soul that has left his body, but has not moved on yet, can influence the mind of the living. (Henry may have wanted to repay their kindness to him.) There also is the idea of alternate realities.
Whatever conclusion you would choose, Henry has been released from his pain and can move on, and the relationship between Sam and Lila shows promise.
The writing ,direction, and acting are all first rate.
4 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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Socks shots
Added 4/13/2009
I don't know what the heck this movie is about. It plays with bending time and reality. It's kinetic...too much so. It comes across as chaotic rather than thought provoking. It's set in NY but to me it seemed like Dickens' London which was disorienting. Death seems to be the subject and the cause of death is suicide. Very grim. Needlessly grim in my opinion and what was the obsession with McGregor wearing white socks with his pants short enough to see them? Were they trying to say he was attempting to out run death?
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Head Trauma...
Added 1/28/2009
STAY is one of those odd little movies that seem to make no sense until the very end. Like CARNIVAL OF SOULS, JACOB'S LADDER, DARK CORNERS, MULLHOLLAND DRIVE, INLAND EMPIRE, etc., STAY creates a mysterious, alternate universe where dream and reality intersect. Psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), his girlfriend, Lila Culpepper (Naomi Watts), and his new patient Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling) are caught up in a shifting nightmare-scape of unraveling sanity. Sam is especially intrigued by Henry's story and his seemingly psychic, almost supernatural abilities. Sam is drawn into Henry's world, which eventually bleeds through and overtakes his own. There are many "WTF?" moments! We are left to be just as confused and confounded as Sam. However, if we can hold on until the final act, we will be rewarded w/ an inovative conclusion. I was impressed...
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Watch It More Than Once!
Added 1/19/2009
A bit srange and confusing, but worth a second view. Not really a "thriller" or "Horror" movie as you may assume from the DVD case notes and description. this is one of those films that when it's finished you will sit around and discuss what the director was trying to say or you might just go "Huh?"
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The United States of Leland
Added 2/4/2009
Beautiful music soundtrack from the movie Somewhere in Time.
Also bought The United States of Leland.
Excellent movie...great acting performences by Kevin Spacey, Ryan Gosling,and Don Chedem.
Wonderful example of a modern dysfunctional family
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The Ethics of Pain
Added 7/7/2008
The premise is rather simple. A teenager, awkward, introvert and burdened with a sensibility that sears his heart to numbness, commits an inexplicable murder. An atrocious one at that. The victim is his girlfriend's brother, Bryan, who is an 11 year old severely autistic nonentity. The main role of Leland Fitzgerald is interpreted by Ryan Gosling with such compelling anguish that it magnifies the complexity of a fragile spirit to such a degree we cannot psychologize the troubled youth because we are disoriented as we observe the indomitable suffering Leland attempts to silence. Likewise we are given a stark visual of the two sets of parents, the questions that harrow them and the way the tragedy unravels what seemed to be a world pulling at the seams of every thread.
The emotionally detached Leland retraces his steps thanks to the invasive insistance of his juvenile hall educator Pearl Madison, admirably played by Don Cheadle, who is undergoing moral dilemmas of his own. Pearl's feigned confidence is contrasted with confounding and disarming depth to Leland's innocent aloofness. The emotional texture of the movie is further enriched by strands of a narrative that follows Bryan's other sister who is unsettled and dejected, an 18 year old who is not allowed to search and delve within her own turbulance. She breaks up with her boyfriend, he too a timid soul reaching for a stability that teeters on the brink of injected scrupolousness. If you then add the torpor and emotional sterility that Leland's dad, an accomplished bestselling author whose fame rests on his descriptive novels that indemnify suburbia, you have in focus a portrait of such a philosophical, psychological and ethical intensity undeniably impressive, expressive and teeming with the brute force that sterilizes our lives as it designates its shallow characteristics. Much more may well be added in terms of the narrative, for it deploys innumerable details that trace a perspective that becomes dissolved just when it seems to have become solidified most. The director, Matthew Ryan Hoge, frames the movie in such a way as to mesmerize the viewer through the autopsy of a society that in the wake of a murder discovers how much everything else is dead within. The motion-sickness tremble of the photographic ambiance of these quivering soulscapes, given full force, reaches a climactic burst when things seem to make sense again and our code of ethics reinstated with trust. It is in that precise moment that a second murder makes the depth of the movie's conscience become too vast for imperatives of psychology or social commentary. The movie stirs, moves, and shocks, but best of all it illuminates the pain of lives gone numb and that dorment force that craves reawakening.
20 out of 21 people found this helpful.
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United States of Leland
Added 6/26/2008
I could not enjoy this movie because my DVD came scratched, and that is one flaw of DVD's: You cannot advance the movie, if you are stuck on a disc scratch.
All in all, we know what is going on, but we are anxious to see things resolved, I have a feeling I missed a lot of that movie.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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