Definitely about something; wish we knew what.
***image1***
Bemused, unbothered and bewildered: That pretty much sums up the feeling you have upon exiting
Stay
. Somebody definitely said something, and they said it with lots of flair and
Sturm und Drang
-but you aren't sure what was said or to whom or, perhaps worst of all, why it needed saying quite so urgently in the first place.
Ewan McGregor, who must be about to die from fatigue and overexposure, plays Sam Foster, which sounds like a brand of beer but is apparently instead a New York psychiatrist. Yet he doesn't seem to know the first thing about the mental health profession, becoming completely flustered when he fills in for another shrink (?!) and his temporary patient Henry (Ryan Gosling, reduced to slouching and smirking) unsurprisingly doesn't want to confide in a complete stranger with a fake American accent. Henry does relent enough to inform his substitute doctor that he's planning to off himself Saturday at midnight; Dr. Foster then stands there dopily while the suicidal youth
walks out of his office
. But wait, it gets better.
Dr. Foster's girlfriend is Lila (an utterly wasted Naomi Watts); like Henry, she's a painter who made her own unsuccessful suicide attempt. As Henry's appointed hour draws nigh and Dr. Foster can't seem to pin down his patient, many things commence to take place which can only be filed under the psychiatric diagnostic category of Freaky Stuff, Not Otherwise Specified. There are unnerving jump cuts, subtly jarring POV switches between Foster and Henry (who pops up from time to time for no readily discernible reason) and bizarre repeated motifs of twins and triplets all walking around the city ***image2***carrying identical brushed steel briefcases. And then there's the fact that Henry's mother has been dead for months, but Foster has a long conversation with her. And then there are flashbacks to a car accident in which someone or several someones were killed. And Lila seems to have some of Henry's paintings in her studio. And then someone, hotly pursued by someone else, who's somehow managed to figure something out, chases someone onto the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, and then-
And then it's suddenly over, with the dull thud of a sodden dishrag hitting the floor. To be sure, it was slickly filmed, and beautifully lit, and it had Bob Hoskins and Janeane Garofalo in it-but what did it
mean
? David Benioff, who also wrote
Troy
and
25th Hour
, may know; but he and director Marc Forster (
Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland
) aren't sharing. It's not that
Stay
isn't meticulously made, or even by and large entertaining; it's just that it wants to be
Donnie Darko
or
Memento
or
The Sixth Sense
-and while it's not clear what it
is
, it's perfectly clear what it's
not
: Worth watching.
