Stay

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I suppose everybody falls back to Earth sometime. After two smash hits in "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland," the filmmaking team of director Marc Forster and film editor Matt Chesse came up short at the box office with their 2005 effort, "Stay." Was the disappointing return deserved? Was it simply the fate of a bad film? Or was "Stay" unjustly overlooked by audiences everywhere? Those are questions only the individual viewer can answer for himself, but I can understand why people might not have thought they would like the film, despite its cast and credentials.

The first problem is the title. David Benioff wrote the screenplay, and therefore one assumes he wrote the title, too, yet who knows about these things. He is also the fellow who wrote one of my favorite movies, "25th Hour." But here, I mean, the title sounds like something you'd say to your dog: "Sit." "Stay." "Roll over." What were people to think when they looked in the newspaper and saw "Stay" playing at their local theater? Well, actually, according to the movie's keep case, the title refers to "a place between life and death," a kind of limbo where people stay temporarily, some people apparently staying longer than others. Still, I'm not sure that knowing such vague information would encourage anyone to run out and see the picture.

More to the point is the movie's plot, which undoubtedly got around by word of mouth as something too weird or convoluted or hard to understand for most moviegoers to bother with, the kind of thing David Lynch did so well in "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive" but which drives a lot of folks nutty. I'll give you a clue about "Stay": Think Ambrose Bierce.

The story begins with Henry Letham's (Ryan Gosling) car in flames. Later, Henry tells his new psychologist, Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), that he purposely torched his automobile, just as he purposely sticks the ends of burning cigarettes into his arm. Then, he calmly tells the doctor that he is going to commit suicide in three days.

The movie's setting is during those next few days leading up to the fateful Saturday when Henry plans his own death. Sam is worried about his new patient; he tries to investigate deeper into Henry's life to figure out how to help him, but the more he digs, the more mysterious things get. Henry can apparently predict the weather and foretell events. Sam's artist girlfriend, Lila (Naomi Watts), who was also at one time suicidal, starts calling Sam "Henry." Sam and Lila appear to have led different lives in their past than the ones they're living now. Everything seems to change and pass, like a sudden, partly metaphoric hailstorm that abruptly blows into town. In background shots, we see people walking through the story in pairs, looking almost identical to one another. After Sam and Henry visit the public aquarium together, we see photos in Lila's studio of the very same aquatic mammals that that Sam and Henry just left. Henry claims that one of Sam's friends, a blind psychologist named Dr. Leon Patterson (Bob Hoskins), is really his dead father. And Sam begins seeing the same events happening to him again and again, as though he were experiencing a continual déjà vu.

What's going on? Is Sam imagining things or losing his mind? Are Sam and Henry a part of the same person? Are we all more than one person inside? Does everyone have a mirror image of himself somewhere? "Everything you know," says Henry, "is a lie." Is life all an illusion? Things really start to fall apart for Sam when he visits Henry's mother (in a place that looks like the Bates house from "Psycho") and talks with her, only to discover later that the mother is dead! That's when the film really begins to get scary.

Duplicate events. Duplicate lives. Is Sam seeing dead people? Sam asks Henry why he keeps coming back to him. Henry replies, "Because you're the only one who can help me." What is the connection between these two men who were total strangers a day before? And what's with Sam's pants? Does he expect a flood? Or is it yet another connection to the young man he's treating?

Good questions; however, it is all too soon that we can see where this is heading and how it will turn out. There is more than a particle of "Mulholland Drive" and "25th Hour" in these characters. But do the film's many enigmas pan out? Not as well as the filmmakers would like us to believe. It's in the telling, not in the material itself or the fine cast, that the film succeeds. The fact is, the film is more atmospheric than it is intellectual: the tone, the mood, the appearance are all-important. For instance, there are some fascinating visual edits in the movie as it moves from scene to scene that are analogous to overlapping dialogue in sound. There are uses of color as well as music and aural effects that set the stage and draw out the characters. The crosscutting between different people and different events blurs the line between what is real and what is imagined.

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