Stay (2005 film)
Encyclopedia
Stay is a 2005 American psychological thriller
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
.
, and introduces Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling
), a survivor of the crash, sitting next to a burning car on the bridge.
Psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor
) and his girlfriend, art teacher 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 is also suspicious of Sam because he has suddenly replaced his ordinary psychiatrist, Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo
). Henry has told Sam that he, Henry, will kill himself that Saturday at midnight, which Sam finds very troubling. Lila, who has survived a past suicide attempt, offers to help to dissuade Henry from killing himself.
Sam investigates Henry's circumstances in an effort to help. After repeatedly attempting to reach Dr. Levy, he comes to her apartment to find her disoriented and lethargic, mumbling incoherent phrases like "I didn't touch him; I know you're not supposed to move him." Henry claims to have killed both of his parents, but Sam finds Henry's mother (Kate Burton
) and her dog living in a bare house, confused about Sam's identity (she insists that he is Henry) and refuses to respond to his questions. Henry's mother insists on feeding Sam, but when she opens the fridge it is completely empty. Her head starts bleeding and when Sam attempts to help her, her dog bites him.
At the clinic to have his arm bandaged, Sam discusses the visit with a police officer (Michael Gaston
) who is curious as to why he would visit that house. Sam explains what happened, but 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 named Athena (Elizabeth Reaser
), whom Henry has mentioned and fallen in love with. She is an aspiring actress and he meets her at a script reading where she is reading lines from Hamlet
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 realizes that Henry plans to commit suicide on Brooklyn Bridge in imitation of the artist.
Sam finds Henry on the 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 film was in fact a random spectator at the site of the crash, including Sam, a doctor, and Lila, a nurse, who treat Henry in an attempt to save him. The brief remarks they make are the same ones heard previously by their dream-world counterparts earlier in the film. They fail to rescue Henry, and Henry dies, but not before seeing Lila as Athena and proposing to her, which Lila accepts out of sympathy.
The entire film up until Henry's death had existed only in his mind - in his last moments... (a plot device used most famously in the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
). However, there are clues that the people surrounding Henry as he lay dying were actually drawn into another world in some way. For instance, after Henry dies and is being loaded into a body bag, Janeane Garofalo's character is heard telling her name to the police: Elizabeth Levy. Since Henry died before hearing this, he would have no way of knowing how to "dream" her true name. Additionally, 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.
. 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
as there are what appear to be continuity mistakes, which are in fact tied into the plot.
, with a domestic gross of $3,626,883 and a foreign gross of $4,715,249, making a total worldwide gross of $8,342,132, it didn't come close to making up for its estimated budget of $50,000,000.
Critical reaction to Stay has been mixed. The film holds a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes
and 41 out of 100 on Metacritic
. Roger Ebert
of the Chicago Sun-Times
gave the film 3½ 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 2½ 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."
Psychological thriller
Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...
film directed by Marc Forster
Marc Forster
Marc Forster is a German-Swiss filmmaker and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the films Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction, The Kite Runner, and Quantum of Solace.- Life and career :...
and written by David Benioff
David Benioff
-Early life:Born David Friedman in New York City, he changed his name to David Benioff, his mother's maiden name. He is the youngest of three children....
. It stars Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor
Ewan Gordon McGregor is a Scottish actor. He has had success in mainstream, indie, and art house films. McGregor is perhaps best known for his roles as heroin addict Mark Renton in the drama Trainspotting , young Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy , and poet Christian in the...
, Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling
Ryan Thomas Gosling is a Canadian actor and musician. He first came to public attention as a child star on the Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club and went on to appear in other family entertainment programmes including Are You Afraid of the Dark? , Goosebumps , Breaker High and Young Hercules...
, Bob Hoskins
Bob Hoskins
Robert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
and Naomi Watts
Naomi Watts
Naomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. Watts began her career in Australian television, where she appeared in series such as Hey Dad..! , Brides of Christ , and Home and Away . Her film debut was the 1986 drama For Love Alone...
, with production by Regency
New Regency Productions
New Regency Productions is a production company founded in 1991 by Arnon Milchan and a subsidiary of Regency Enterprises.It is located on the 20th Century Fox lot, and Fox is the current distributor of Regency releases since 1998, but is a wholly independent company. Warner Bros. Pictures was the...
and distribution by 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
. The film represents intense relationships centering on reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
, death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
, love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
and the afterlife
Afterlife
The afterlife is the belief that a part of, or essence of, or soul of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity, survives the death of the body of this world and this lifetime, by natural or supernatural means, in contrast to the belief in eternal...
.
Plot
The film opens with a car crash on Brooklyn BridgeBrooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...
, and introduces Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling
Ryan Thomas Gosling is a Canadian actor and musician. He first came to public attention as a child star on the Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club and went on to appear in other family entertainment programmes including Are You Afraid of the Dark? , Goosebumps , Breaker High and Young Hercules...
), a survivor of the crash, sitting next to a burning car on the bridge.
Psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor
Ewan Gordon McGregor is a Scottish actor. He has had success in mainstream, indie, and art house films. McGregor is perhaps best known for his roles as heroin addict Mark Renton in the drama Trainspotting , young Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy , and poet Christian in the...
) and his girlfriend, art teacher Lila (Naomi Watts
Naomi Watts
Naomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. Watts began her career in Australian television, where she appeared in series such as Hey Dad..! , Brides of Christ , and Home and Away . Her film debut was the 1986 drama For Love Alone...
) 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 is also suspicious of Sam because he has suddenly replaced his ordinary psychiatrist, Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo
Janeane Garofalo
Janeane Garofalo is an American stand-up comedian, actress, political activist and writer. She is the former co-host on the now defunct Air America Radio's The Majority Report. Garofalo continues to circulate regularly within New York City's local comedy and performance art scene.-Early...
). Henry has told Sam that he, Henry, will kill himself that Saturday at midnight, which Sam finds very troubling. Lila, who has survived a past suicide attempt, offers to help to dissuade Henry from killing himself.
Sam investigates Henry's circumstances in an effort to help. After repeatedly attempting to reach Dr. Levy, he comes to her apartment to find her disoriented and lethargic, mumbling incoherent phrases like "I didn't touch him; I know you're not supposed to move him." Henry claims to have killed both of his parents, but Sam finds Henry's mother (Kate Burton
Kate Burton
Kate Burton may refer to:*Kate Burton , American actress of stage and television*Kate Burton , British aid worker who was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip in December 2005 and released later that month-See also:...
) and her dog living in a bare house, confused about Sam's identity (she insists that he is Henry) and refuses to respond to his questions. Henry's mother insists on feeding Sam, but when she opens the fridge it is completely empty. Her head starts bleeding and when Sam attempts to help her, her dog bites him.
At the clinic to have his arm bandaged, Sam discusses the visit with a police officer (Michael Gaston
Michael Gaston
Michael Gaston is an American film and television actor. He played agent Quinn on the show Prison Break. He appeared as Gray Anderson on the CBS drama series Jericho. He also appeared in the first season of The Sopranos as a compulsive gambler in trouble with Tony...
) who is curious as to why he would visit that house. Sam explains what happened, but 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 named Athena (Elizabeth Reaser
Elizabeth Reaser
Elizabeth Ann Reaser is an American film, television, and stage actress. Her work includes the films Stay, The Family Stone, and The Twilight Saga and the TV series Saved, Grey's Anatomy and The Ex-List....
), whom Henry has mentioned and fallen in love with. She is an aspiring actress and he meets her at a script reading where she is reading lines from Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
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 realizes that Henry plans to commit suicide on Brooklyn Bridge in imitation of the artist.
Sam finds Henry on the 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
Survivor guilt
Survivor, survivor's, or survivors guilt or syndrome is a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives themselves to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not...
. Each of the characters introduced earlier in the film was in fact a random spectator at the site of the crash, including Sam, a doctor, and Lila, a nurse, who treat Henry in an attempt to save him. The brief remarks they make are the same ones heard previously by their dream-world counterparts earlier in the film. They fail to rescue Henry, and Henry dies, but not before seeing Lila as Athena and proposing to her, which Lila accepts out of sympathy.
The entire film up until Henry's death had existed only in his mind - in his last moments... (a plot device used most famously in the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short story by Ambrose Bierce. It was originally published in 1890, and first collected in Bierce's 1891 book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians...
). However, there are clues that the people surrounding Henry as he lay dying were actually drawn into another world in some way. For instance, after Henry dies and is being loaded into a body bag, Janeane Garofalo's character is heard telling her name to the police: Elizabeth Levy. Since Henry died before hearing this, he would have no way of knowing how to "dream" her true name. Additionally, 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.
Cast
- Ewan McGregorEwan McGregorEwan Gordon McGregor is a Scottish actor. He has had success in mainstream, indie, and art house films. McGregor is perhaps best known for his roles as heroin addict Mark Renton in the drama Trainspotting , young Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy , and poet Christian in the...
as Dr. Sam Foster - Naomi WattsNaomi WattsNaomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. Watts began her career in Australian television, where she appeared in series such as Hey Dad..! , Brides of Christ , and Home and Away . Her film debut was the 1986 drama For Love Alone...
as Lila Culpepper - Ryan GoslingRyan GoslingRyan Thomas Gosling is a Canadian actor and musician. He first came to public attention as a child star on the Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club and went on to appear in other family entertainment programmes including Are You Afraid of the Dark? , Goosebumps , Breaker High and Young Hercules...
as Henry Letham - Bob HoskinsBob HoskinsRobert William "Bob" Hoskins, Jr. is an English actor known for playing Cockney rough diamonds, psychopaths and gangsters, in films such as The Long Good Friday , and Mona Lisa , and lighter roles in family films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook .- Early life :Hoskins was born in Bury St...
as Dr. Leon Patterson - Janeane GarofaloJaneane GarofaloJaneane Garofalo is an American stand-up comedian, actress, political activist and writer. She is the former co-host on the now defunct Air America Radio's The Majority Report. Garofalo continues to circulate regularly within New York City's local comedy and performance art scene.-Early...
as Dr. Beth Levy - Elizabeth ReaserElizabeth ReaserElizabeth Ann Reaser is an American film, television, and stage actress. Her work includes the films Stay, The Family Stone, and The Twilight Saga and the TV series Saved, Grey's Anatomy and The Ex-List....
as Athena - B.D. WongB.D. WongBradley Darryl "BD" Wong is an American actor, best-known for his roles as Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, as Father Ray Mukada on HBO's Oz, Henry Wu in the movie Jurassic Park, and for his starring role as Song Liling in the Broadway production of M...
as Dr. Ren - Kate BurtonKate BurtonKate Burton may refer to:*Kate Burton , American actress of stage and television*Kate Burton , British aid worker who was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip in December 2005 and released later that month-See also:...
as Maureen Letham - Amy SedarisAmy SedarisAmy Louise Sedaris is an American actress, author, and comedian. She is known for playing the character Jerri Blank in the Comedy Central television series Strangers with Candy. Sedaris regularly collaborates with her older brother, humorist and author David Sedaris...
as Toni - Mark MargolisMark MargolisMark Margolis is an American actor who has been making films since 1976.Margolis went to Temple University briefly before moving to New York City, where he studied drama with Stella Adler and at the Actors Studio...
as the book store owner
Visual style
Marc Forster's directorial style is artistic, referencing many other films including VertigoVertigo (film)
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A...
. 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
Nicolas Roeg
Nicolas Jack Roeg, CBE, BSC is an English film director and cinematographer.-Life and career:Roeg was born in London, the son of Mabel Gertrude and Jack Nicolas Roeg...
as there are what appear to be continuity mistakes, which are in fact tied into the plot.
Reception
The film was a box office failureBox office bomb
The phrase box office bomb refers to a film for which the production and marketing costs greatly exceeded the revenue regained by the movie studio. This should not be confused with Hollywood accounting when official figures show large losses, yet the movie is a financial success.A film's financial...
, with a domestic gross of $3,626,883 and a foreign gross of $4,715,249, making a total worldwide gross of $8,342,132, it didn't come close to making up for its estimated budget of $50,000,000.
Critical reaction to Stay has been mixed. The film holds a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
and 41 out of 100 on Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
of the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
gave the film 3½ 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
Peter Travers
Peter Travers is an American film critic, who has written for, in turn, People and Rolling Stone. Travers also hosts a celebrity interview show called Popcorn on ABC News Now and ABCNews.com.-Career:...
of Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
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
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...
of ReelViews gave Stay 2½ stars out of four, calling it "interesting" but finding it "hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
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
Lou Lumenick
Louis J. "Lou" Lumenick is an American film critic. He is the chief film critic and a blogger for the New York Post and has reviewed films there since 1999.-Life and career:Lumenick was born and raised in Astoria, Queens...
of the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
panned the film, calling it "a trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb."