PLOT: After a horrific traffic accident on the Brooklyn Bridge, a young art student (Ryan Gosling) plots his suicide while a psychiatrist (Ewan McGregor) tries to intervene.
German-Swiss filmmaker Marc Forster made his name internationally with the elegant Finding Neverland.
As a fiction-fantasy about the origins of the Peter Pan myth, it was an Oscar nominee graced with strong performances, including from Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
But Forster's latest film, Stay, is another radical turn in his career. The 'lost boy' in this drama is a suicidal art student. There is no Neverland magic here, only anguish.
Instead of whisking us off into a magical world of the unfettered imagination, Forster takes us on a perilous journey with a murky destination and an unsatisfying result.
The film opens and closes with a deadly traffic accident at night on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Dazed and confused, a 20-year-old New York art student (Ryan Gosling) walks away from the wreck and into therapy for his pain, guilt, and despair. Apparently as a rebellious artistic act, he resolves to kill himself at midnight on his 21st birthday -- in three days. He announces that intention.
The youth's new psychiatrist (Ewan McGregor) is passionately concerned. One reason is that Gosling is making a dire threat and may be dangerous to others. The other reason is that the shrink's own artist girlfriend (Naomi Watts) tried to commit suicide, and still has the scars on her wrists to remind them.
Stay was crafted by David Benioff, an intriguing screenwriter who transformed his own novel into Spike Lee's fascinating drama The 25th Hour. That film was weird enough.
Stay is absolutely out there, a dizzying, time-fractured narrative that spins off onto a surreal plane, not always with the audience on the same level. In fact, you begin to suspect that the filmmakers are lying to us about what we are seeing.
The content -- agitated talk about suicide and the value of life -- is disturbing enough. To feel that the story is out of our grasp is more so because we lose touch with the mechanisms that allow us to process the film experience.
Forster also uses an impressive clutch of techniques to deliberately heighten the disorientation.
Even in a confusing scenario, however, actors can elevate a film by creating textures, moods, an atmosphere. In Stay, the Canadian-born Gosling is interesting because he has perfected the art of the victim-victimizer in films (The Believer, Murder By Numbers, The United States Of Leland).
In contrast, McGregor is a charming, if eternally flawed hero on screen (Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge!, Big Fish, young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the latest Star Wars episodes). In Stay, he is so earnest it is almost painful.
As for Watts, as well as co-stars Bob Hoskins and Janeane Garafolo, they do their usual strong if idiosyncratic work. So, if you do not like Stay, it will not be because of the quality of the acting or the physicality of the setting they work in.
Instead, it will be that you cannot or will not understand what Forster & company are on about in their surreal drama. The film pushes us to extremes and, finally, you don't know why.
BOTTOM LINE: Disturbing, and not always rewarding, because the filmmaker appears to be lying to us at times, this searing drama deals with critical mental health problems. Despite the quality performances, buyer beware.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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