Spoiler Filled Review — Stay 2005

As the title warns, this review is filled with spoilers, best for someone who has already seen the film, unless, for you, ‘spoilers’ don’t spoil :).

Basically I’m going to review the whole movie in detail because this one is just so intricate and amazing and underrated and I just need to talk about it.

So, let’s get a few things out of the way, Stay stars Ryan Gosling, Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, and is more of a psychological thriller than a horror, though we do see some blood, I wouldn’t call it ‘gory’ at all, plus it isn’t really all that scary…but there are some intense scenes. If you haven’t seen the movie and are reading this anyway… I’m giving you a chance to watch it before I potentially ruin it… this is a movie with a ‘twist’ at the end and if you read much further, that’s going to be one of the first things I’ll reveal…this movie really is great… However, if you do keep reading, I could actually argue that this movie is more enjoyable to watch knowing the ending, I know I love re-watching it knowing the truth from the beginning! So maybe you should just read on :p

Alright then, here we go. Now, Ive seen many reviews online by people who say it’s beyond obvious very early on (as early as the opening scene!) what the ‘twist’ ending will be…and okay.. I guess I can see that, personally I didn’t figure it out…but I think with all the movies I watch, I appear to have trained myself not to even try and figure things out before they are revealed to me. I love coming to the twist/conclusion the way the movie-makers intended rather than figuring it out on my own. So, even though it probably makes me seem ‘dense’, I actually like it. However, this one is kind of an exception anyway since once you know the ending, every time you watch it again, you see a bit more and you understand more about a scene that originally made little-to-no sense to you…

Alright then, so the big ‘twist’ at the end? The whole movie (with the exception of the last 10 or so minutes and perhaps a few brief clips) is actually going on inside of Ryan Gosling’s character, Henry Latham, ‘s head!! The best word to describe it, would be a dream, although he’s not really asleep, he has been in a bad car accident and he is drifting in and out of consciousness as he dies.

But the movie basically runs with the dream concept. The scenes in the movie move seamlessly or even merge with one another. And since the characters in the movie are actually people Henry has seen at the crash site, for whom he has created stories in his mind, the two people who are, in reality, right in his face attempting to help him, are the stars of his dream (along with himself), Sam (Ewan McGregor) and Lila (Naomi Watts).

In his mind, Sam and Lila are a couple. Sam is a psychiatrist and Lila was once one of his patients…she is also an art teacher/artist who once very nearly accomplished suicide. And Henry, himself, is a troubled, suicidal young artist/student, and a new patient of Sam’s.

In the ‘dream’, Henry believes he killed his parents and says he plans to kill himself on his 21st birthday, in the movie that gives him 3 days. Henry hears voices (voices that are actually the real voices of the people at the crash site) saying things to him like “I didn’t move them, I know you’re not supposed to move them..” and “Stay with me Henry”…
Now, in the last scene of the movie where everything is revealed, there is a distraught woman at the crash site, I don’t actually think she had been drinking but perhaps Henry interpreted her distress as drunkenness.. either that or he assigned her some guilt/blame in his mind because she was lying and had, in fact, moved him. Either way, in his mind, this woman is Henry’s former psychiatrist and she’s having a very hard time, drinking and pills and clearly feeling guilty about something. ‘Stay’ is very confusing (like a dream!), there are many scenes in which characters do or say strange things, or a scene might repeat in a loop or characters might switch back and forth…but I think they depict a dream wonderfully and once you know the ending, the strange scenes make so much more sense.

Because Henry sees Sam first (at the crash site) and probably also because they’re both dudes, Henry assigns Sam the main role in his dream. Sam is actually more the one leading the dream..but, because Henry is the one dreaming, Henry and Sam sometimes become almost the same person — (ever have a dream where you weren’t the ‘leader’? but you still were though, since you’re the one dreaming everything up, right?) So sometimes Henry is Henry, and sometimes Sam is actually representing Henry…a great example of when Sam is undeniably Henry is when “Sam” is chasing Athena down the spiral stairs, he starts out following her, but then he loses her and starts running and can’t catch up to her. Then “Sam” drops the engagement ring he’s been carrying around for “Lila”, and the dropping of the ring symbolizes that Henry, in reality, has dropped his own engagement ring (for Athena) during the crash.

Guilt is probably in-arguably the main theme of the movie/dream because, in reality, Henry feels intense guilt as he was driving the car and his parents and girlfriend were passengers and they all died… The accident was actually not Henry’s fault, but he is in no state to be aware of that. Guilt is the reason Henry wants to kill himself. In the dream, though he admits to having killed his parents, he doesn’t actually have a girlfriend. Rather, the actress who plays his real girlfriend is just a girl he secretly loves but is too afraid to ask out… I suppose he distances her, perhaps because, in reality, he isn’t as sure of her death as he his of that of his parent’s and maybe he thinks she should have never met him, then she’d be alive…but of course he still loves her.

There is also a horrible scene where we are introduced to Henry’s mother. This is another scene where “Sam” is representing Henry. Sam is looking for Henry and his search takes him to Henry’s mother, who Henry claimed was dead. But the mother is clearly not in a right state of mind, she’s not making sense, mistaking Sam for Henry and babbling about how lonely she is and how Henry never visits… Then she begins bleeding from a head wound presumably hidden under the bandana she is wearing. This scene is partially self-explanatory, I mean there are some obvious things like the blood is obviously a result of the crash, and when she’s talking about being lonely, well I always figured that either Henry is feeling guilty that he didn’t spend enough time with his mother in life, or let her into his life much… or another thought I had was that the loneliness symbolizes the fact that she died before Henry in the crash and, since Henry must know deep down, that he isn’t going to make it, it’s like he thinks it’s taking him too long.
In this scene we also meet “Olive”, Henry’s childhood dog…and I have never been able to figure out her significance…she bites Sam and I really have no idea why or why she’s even there…but I don’t understand everything, dreams are weird right? ;)

Eyes are another big thing in this movie! The song that was playing in the car as the crash began was “These Eyes”, in fact the last lyric we hear before things go bad are the words “these eyes”, and simultaneously, Henry looked into his girlfriend’s eyes… and that really sticks in his mind (understandably, since it’s the last thing he really remembers clearly). So eyes are mentioned a lot in the movie, and at one point during the last scene, Naomi Watts (Lila) is looking into Henry’s eyes and he starts to see his girlfriend (Athena) instead of her. He’s delirious of course, but he sees her and he asks her to marry him (something he had likely planned on doing that night if the accident hadn’t happened). He’s looking at Lila and seeing Athena, but his mind is having a hard time with the fact that Lila’s eyes aren’t the right colour. Athena has brown eyes, but Lila has blue eyes.

I haven’t mentioned Henry’s father yet, but, like his mother, his father does feature in his dream (of course). But to be honest I’ve never really been able to decipher much about why he assigns him the role that he does…

Henry’s father is first introduced in the dream as “Leon”, an old friend of Sam’s. Then, when Henry meets Leon, he sees his father but Sam tells him that Leon doesn’t have children, and Leon has no idea who Henry is.. Leon is also BLIND in Henry’s mind, something I have no explanation for… I also don’t understand why Henry recognizes him as his father but Leon doesn’t know him at all… But that’s the beauty of this movie, maybe one day I’ll figure it out and if not, that’s fine too. This movie is a dream, it might not make total sense to anyone, including the person dreaming it up, so I don’t mind not knowing everything…

After the scene where Sam meets Henry’s mother, he is being treated by a local police officer who tells him Henry’s mother died years ago, Sam then asks the man if Henry’s mother had brown eyes (this is how Sam saw her eyes), the police officer corrects him, tells him he knew her all his life and she had “the bluest eyes in town”. This is just another reference to the fact that, in reality, Henry is seeing Lila as Athena but can’t reconcile the difference in eye colour. There’s one more reference to this…after a very confusing scene in which Henry places his hands over Leon’s eyes and cures his blindness, (but he still doesn’t recognize Henry), there is a scene where Sam runs into Leon and Leon remarks how he always thought Sam would have had brown eyes. I love all these references, even though it may seem like overkill, I disagree, I think that in a ‘dying dream’ you would likely fixate on the last thing you truly remember, and for Henry that was looking into his girlfriend’s eyes and the song on the radio only made the moment more memorable for him. Now he’s trying to believe he’s looking up at her and Lila’s eyes just won’t change…

Suicide is another big theme in “Stay”, mainly because of guilt it seems. That’s certainly Henry’s motive, but Lila’s is somewhat unclear. I mentioned earlier that Lila had previously attempted suicide (this is in the dream only, I have scrutinized my copy and can’t see any sign that Lila in reality has ever attempted suicide…her wrists are totally covered so I don’t know why Henry would specifically say (in the dream) that he saw the scars on her wrists) and certainly Henry’s former psychiatrist seems at least to be portrayed as a suicide risk. In addition, the artist in Henry’s dream (a fictional artist named “Tristan Riveau”) also committed suicide and considered it to be his “ultimate work of art”. The whole theme of suicide is pretty self explanatory, in reality Henry feels responsible for the crash, plus he knows he is going to die, even wants to die at this point, so death, in general, is certainly going to be on his mind and leak into his dreamworld.

Art is also a HUGE theme in this movie, Lila is an art teacher and an artist, we can assume that in reality Henry was also an artist since in the dream he is a university art student. “Tristan Riveau” is the fictional artist that Henry idolizes in his dream, Riveau killed himself on his 21st birthday by shooting himself on the Brooklyn Bridge and Henry plans to do the same. Many of the scenes in the movie involve art, in some scenes Henry is in an art class and pieces are being discussed. Henry paints a tortured piece that is literally just the words “forgive me” over and over in fine print on a very large canvas; this is because, in reality, Henry is actually repeating the words “forgive me” under his breath. The theme of “art” stretches beyond just paintings and artworks, there is also a beautiful dance scene that I don’t fully understand, it shows Henry watching Athena dancing in a class with a man that she is clearly in love with, but he doesn’t seem to return her feelings… There’s also a scene, that once again, I don’t fully understand, where Athena is rehearsing a scene for a production of Hamlet.

There’s tons of other little awesome details, for example, when Sam tells Lila that the neighbour’s baby kept him up in the night, and Lila informs him that their neighbours are in their nineties, that’s just a little piece of reality that’s getting through and Henry is trying to make sense of in his dream, but he can’t quite do it. Or when Henry’s head randomly begins to pour blood while he’s walking down the street and everyone around him is just literally frozen still and staring at him, but no one attempts to help him, though a couple of people mutter things like “he’s not going to make it”, and a little boy asks his mother if “that man” is going to die… This is pretty obvious once you know the ending, but I still think it’s an excellent depiction of how Henry must feel in reality. There’s also a very interesting scene that I don’t fully understand, where Henry is in a strip club and a slide show of what appears to be his life is projected in the background. The scene is sad and almost seems pathetic, like a metaphor of how Henry feels about his life now that it’s been cut short so soon and he feels like he’s to blame.

Quotes:

This movie has some wonderful quotes so I’m going to end this by sharing a few of my favourites:

“Look around you, if this is a dream, the whole world is inside it.”
“There’s too much beauty to quit.”
“‘Bad art’ is more tragically beautiful than ‘good art’ because it documents human failure.”
“Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you.”
“The world is an illusion.”
“An elegant suicide is the ultimate work of art.”

Now go watch, or re-watch “Stay”, enjoy!