It’s cliché to say that every problem seems like a
life-or-death scenario when you’re young. But the truth is, with burgeoning
plans for colleges, careers, and relationships, being a teenager is filled with
decisions that can have a lasting impact. Teens feel that pressure. It’s the
first time people have a good deal of autonomy over the course their lives will
take. No wonder it’s a point in life that leads to such angst, and great movies
chronicling it. If I Stay is not a
great movie about being a teenager, but it captures some of the subjective
experience of having the weight of your future on your hesitant steps into
something like adulthood.
It’s a teen weepie that features a high school girl (Chloe
Grace Moretz) dealing with her first real boyfriend (Jamie Blackley). She’s a
brilliant cellist and wants to go to Julliard. He wants to stay with his skinny-jeans-wearing
garage band in Portland and hope to get signed to a record label. Will they
break up or try a long distance relationship? It’s a small problem shot in
typical glossy teen melodrama style. I’ll admit it’s not very interesting from
the outside, but the movie does a good job of communicating the subjective
enormity of the question.
What elevates this standard teen romance is a very real injection
of life and death. She’s in a car crash. It’s bad. She’s rushed to the
hospital, along with her parents (Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard) and little
brother (Jakob Davies). She’s in a coma. Prognosis is iffy. We see the previous
18 months of her life, the romance, the college worries, fun times with
parents, dates, concerts, practices, school, hanging out with friends, and
more. Intercut with those moments are shots of her hooked up to tubes in the ICU, heart
monitors beeping while tearful bedside visitors – grandparents (Stacy Keach and
Gabrielle Rose), friends (Liana Liberato and Lauren Lee Smith) – wait and
worry. All the while, and here’s the movie’s biggest and corniest symbolic
flourish, the girl’s spirit walks around the hospital, watching her family, remembering
her past, and trying to decide whether she’ll stay or go, whether she’ll wake
up or die.
Despite bouncing between her normal teen past and comatose
present, all this is presented in a fairly conventional and linear fashion, little
time for artsy expressiveness. Imagine what a Terrence Malick or Apichatpong
Weerasethakul would do with this material, and then forget it. This is a movie
more interested in tenderly evocative prose rather than cinematic poetry.
Documentarian R.J. Cutler makes his fiction film debut here and brings to it a
good eye, fine pace, and delicate touch. He pulls emotional triggers without
seeming to be excessively manipulative about it. Major weepy potential is softly
played, sad without belaboring the point. The slick widescreen photography by
John de Borman is beautifully blocked in a way that doesn’t call attention to
its casual beauty, while the editing finds minor trembles of emotional stream
of consciousness in standard plotting that gains power through its
juxtapositions.
On its own, the girl’s life would be a minor, but likeable,
pokey drama. It’s pleasant to spend time with her great parents. They’re cool,
former punk rockers. They’re understanding, judiciously permissive and always
ready with smart advice well spoken. There are also some minor pleasures to be
found in a teen romance that plucks at some of the right heartstrings. Adapting
Gayle Forman’s novel, screenwriter Shauna Cross, who also wrote the wonderful
roller derby comedy Whip It, has a
good feel for detail. It’s genuine in its approach to quiet fumbling, biting of
the lower lip, sudden moves. Worries about separating over a long distance
possibility are shortsighted and nicely observed. A first love scene is neatly
edited with a series of dissolves, set to an acoustic cover of Beyoncé’s “Halo,”
as the girl compares caressing the boy’s body to playing the cello. It’s sweet.
Juxtaposing average teen movie worries with a ghostly
bedside vigil brings a mournful weight to it. Sure, these are ordinary teen
concerns, not overly original or especially interesting on their own. But
through the risk that these last few months might end up being her last,
there’s an underlying urgency. When I read in the news about a car accident
that leaves an entire family broken apart, dead or dying, it makes me feel
sick. The normal details of their lives are suddenly imbued with a melancholy.
If someone survives such a crisis, how can one go on living with so much
suddenly gone? That If I Stay captures
even a glimmer of that response is to its credit. I didn’t need Moretz
wandering hospital halls to provide it.
But this is an affecting, heartfelt little drama that slowly
overcomes its shaggier artificial impulses to find a strong emotional core,
admirably underplaying big moments when it could go histrionic. The climax
turns on two small scenes. The first finds Stacy Keach delivering a teary
monologue in what is one of the most vulnerable performances of his career. The
second is a flashback campfire sing-along jam session to Smashing Pumpkins in
which all the characters spend what will be their final happiest moments
together. Both are played quietly, all the more effective for it. Commercial
concessions, like an overreliance on voiceover that tramples over potentially
powerful silences, only smooth over rough edges. It’s a good movie, with fine
performances and solid resonances. But imagining longer silences, more artful
editing, I could see a great film in there somewhere.
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