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Stay (2005 film)
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Stay is an American film directed by Marc Forster and written by David Benioff. It stars Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Bob Hoskins and Naomi Watts, with production by Regency and distribution by 20th Century Fox. The film represents intense relationships centering on reality, death, love and the afterlife.
movie opens with a car crash on Brooklyn Bridge, and introduces Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), apparently a survivor of the crash, sitting next to a burning car on the bridge.
Psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) and his girlfriend Lila (Naomi Watts) are then introduced in a new scene.
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Encyclopedia
Stay is an American film directed by Marc Forster and written by David Benioff. It stars Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Bob Hoskins and Naomi Watts, with production by Regency and distribution by 20th Century Fox. The film represents intense relationships centering on reality, death, love and the afterlife.
Plot summary
The movie opens with a car crash on Brooklyn Bridge, and introduces Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), apparently a survivor of the crash, sitting next to a burning car on the bridge.
Psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) and his girlfriend Lila (Naomi Watts) are then introduced in a new scene. Sam discusses his patient, Henry, a college student and aspiring artist whom he describes as depressed and paranoid. Sometimes Henry hears voices, and he seems able to predict future events. Henry has told Sam that he will kill himself that Saturday at midnight, which Sam finds very troubling. Lila, an art teacher who has survived a past suicide attempt, offers to help to dissuade Henry from killing himself. But first they must find Henry.
Sam investigates Henry's circumstances in an effort to help. Henry claims to have killed both of his parents, but Sam finds that Henry's mother appears to be alive. Sam visits Henry's mother but finds her living in a bare house, confused about Sam's identity (she insists that he is Henry) and refuses to respond to her questions. Henry's mother insists on feeding Sam, but when she opens the fridge it is completely empty, and then her dog bites Sam.
At the clinic to have his arm bandaged, Sam discusses the visit with a police officer who is curious as to why he would visit that house. Sam reveals that she started to bleed from a head wound during his conversation with Henry's mother. The police officer tells him that the woman who lived there is dead. This seems to send Sam into a fugue in which the same scene is repeated several times.
Later Sam contacts a waitress (Elizabeth Reaser) with whom Henry had fallen in love. She is an aspiring actress and he meets her at a script reading where she is reading lines with another man. She agrees to take him to Henry, but after a long trip down winding staircases he loses her. When he gets back to the rehearsal room, she is there reading the same lines as when he first met her.
The search continues until 11:33 pm on Saturday, less than half an hour before Henry plans to kill himself. At a bookshop known to have been frequented by Henry, Sam finds a painting that Henry had painted and bartered for books about Henry's favorite artist. He learns that the artist had killed himself on Brooklyn Bridge, on his twenty-first birthday. Henry's twenty-first birthday is Sunday, and Sam realises that Henry plans to commit suicide on Brooklyn Bridge in imitation of the artist.
Sam finds Henry on Brooklyn Bridge in a physical atmosphere that is increasingly unraveling. Sam turns away as Henry puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
The car crash of the first scene is then reprised. Henry was fatally wounded in the crash but, in his last moments, is suffering survivor guilt. Each of the characters introduced earlier in the movie was in fact a spectator at the site of the crash, including Sam, a doctor, and Lila, a nurse, who treat Henry in an attempt to save him. They fail, and Henry dies, but not before appearing to get some relief when Lila, whom he believes to be his girlfriend, says she will marry him.
The entire movie up until Henry's death had existed in his mind, in his last moments (a plot device used most famously in the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge). Before parting, Sam appears to get a flash in his mind of the experiences between him and Lila that Henry had constructed, and asks Lila out for coffee.
Visual style
Marc Forster's directorial style is artistic, referencing many other films including Vertigo. Details such as the length of a character's trousers and what he is wearing on his feet are significant, too. Forster has spoken of the film's stylistic link to the films of Nicolas Roeg
There are what appear to be continuity mistakes, which are in fact tied into the plot. However, there are some genuine continuity errors in the film, such as when a character's beard changes length between shots.
Connections to Hamlet
Several times in the movie William Shakespeare's play Hamlet is in some way referenced, and there are things in the movie that suggest that the play was an inspiration for the movie.
- "Letham" is an anagram of "Hamlet"
- Athena uses Hamlet's line, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
- Athena is cast as Ophelia (who is doomed to die), but would rather be in Hamlet's shoes (debating death, as Henry is)
- Sam's girlfriend Lila has tried to commit suicide. Hamlet's girlfriend Ophelia drowns in what may be a passive suicide.
- Henry sees his father's "ghost"
- Athena says her favorite line in "Hamlet" is, "
- HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
- In Act II, Scene ii (the scene Athena reads with her Rosencrantz friend)
- HAMLET: Denmark's a prison.
- ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.
- A play within a play theme.
Reception
Critical reaction to Stay has been mixed. The film holds a rating of 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and 41 out of 100 on Metacritic. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3˝ stars out of four, saying, "The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone also praised the film, awarding it three stars out of four and saying, "Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative."
James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave Stay 2˝ stars out of four, calling it "interesting" but finding it "hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C", praising the "profuse imagery" but ultimately feeling it to be "a tepid film" with "flat characters" and "anchorless performances". Lou Lumenick of the New York Post panned the film, calling it "a trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb."
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