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Stay is a 2005 psychological thriller directed by Marc Forster.
- Tagline: Between the worlds of the living and the dead there is a place you're not supposed to stay.
Cast
- Ewan McGregor – Dr. Sam Foster
- Ryan Gosling – Henry Letham
- Kate Burton – Mrs. Letham
- Naomi Watts – Lila Culpepper
- Janeane Garofalo – Dr. Beth Levy
- Elizabeth Reaser – Athena
Plot
The world of the living and dead are blurred. The main character is a suicidal, deranged student/artist Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling) who is treated by his school psychiatrist, Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor). When Foster attempts to save Letham, he meets people who don't exist, and runs around to find people who have been dead for years. The film's irony is showcased when Foster appears to be Letham and delusional. Bob Hoskins also stars as Letham's father, Dr. Leon Patterson, a blind man who re-directs the movie when he suddenly sees that the world is an illusion. A confusing, suspenseful film about the relations of perception and reality.
Interpretations and speculations
Please note: This is a preliminary and highly speculative interpretation, and one which is still under development. Hopefully this will encourage the thinking process about the movie and further our overall understanding of the plot. Do not take these interpretations as concrete or verbatim, and feel free to build upon this section if you feel you have something to add or help clarify. Finally, do not read this section if you have not watched the movie, as it contains critical plot explorations that will detract from the experience of watching the movie for the first time!
For starters, it is clear that the entire movie takes place as Henry Letham is in the process of dying, or otherwise struggling to "decide" whether to continue to hold on to his life in spite of what has happened. When we take what we see in the final scene and apply it to the events of the movie, it can be deduced that Henry hears the voices of the people around him as he lies mortally wounded on the bridge and uses them to craft his dream world in which he supposedly makes his decision to live or die (assuming that he does indeed have a choice). All the characters in the film, in fact, turn out to either be people surrounding him as he dies, or those that were with him in the vehicle that crashed. To summarize, we can assume that the entire span of the movie elapses in the same period of time as the final scene. This scenario is very similar to the events of a short story by Ambrose Bierce called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
This theory is supported by many references throughout the film. For example when Leon miraculously gains sight, he declares that the Buddhists were right in saying that the world is an illusion. Additionally, Henry is obsessed with a fake artist by the name of Tristan Reveur, reveur being French for dreamer. Another possibility is that the distance between Athena and Henry in his dream world represents his knowledge or supposition that he is now forever separated from her in the real world regardless of whether or not he survives the ordeal.
Presuming this theory is accurate, the movie dances between notions of purgatory/hell/heaven and the simple inner-conversations of a dying man trying to come to terms with his life. He feels extreme guilt about "what he did" and is convinced he's on his way to hell, or already there.
Either way, the movie is leading up to the moment of truth, where he is either being judged, facing certain death, judging himself, or consciously making the choice of whether to live or die (this is left completely to the imagination by the film). When the movie finally arrives at the final scene, the car accident that fatally wounds him, the entire world becomes very visually unstable, until finally he dies. The world becomes relatively clear again, although some blurriness is still apparent. Notably, during this final scene, Sam is revealed to indeed be a doctor of some sort (not necessarily a psychiatrist). This would further suggest that whatever went on in Henry's subconscious had the real world interwoven within it, and perhaps even vice versa! This is lightly inferred shortly after Henry dies, when Sam, who shouldn't have any notion of what Henry had envisioned during this whole film, has brief memory flashes of times spent with Lila in the dream world. In Henry's world, Sam and Lila were a couple; but in the "real world", Sam and Lila met only while trying to save Henry's life after the accident.
Another aspect of the movie that must be explored is that all the individual characters would seem to exemplify various facets or direct representations of Henry's psyche, perhaps helping him either understand himself somehow, or otherwise attempting to sort out his emotions or desires. This theory is supported by numerous scenes in the movie; one example being the fact that we see Lila hanging up her paintings which all turn out to be signed as works by "Henry Letham". Along these lines it can also be said that Sam is a direct representation of Henry's desire to survive and forgive himself for what happened, whereas Henry himself represents the part of him that shoulders all of the blame and desires nothing more than to perish along with his family and girlfriend. This theory is supported by numerous aspects of the film, such as the "interchange" scenes where we see virtually seamless transitions from Sam to Henry and vice-versa, as well as the combative exchanges between them regarding his desire to commit suicide in his dream world. There are also numerous occasions of Sam being confused with Henry by various characters, including Lila herself. It's also debatable that Sam's hair and overall appearance are not too unlike Henry's.
It is also very much possible that in addition to, or instead of this theory, that the movie plays on the Hindu theme (which has been played upon by others, such as The Matrix) of dreams within dreams, whereby the entire world is actually a part of a dream, whose dreamer is nothing but a dream character in yet another dream. This would be supported by the reference to the Buddhist "World is an illusion" idea, especially since Buddhism was born from Hinduism.
Another aspect of the movie is that there are doubles and sometimes triples of the 'extras' in several scenes. In the scene in which Henry walks out of the Art lecture and meets Sam, soon after all the students come out as well and you can see several couples wearing the same clothing. This is also shown when two Chinese women are coming out of a cab that Sam goes into. This may be explained by Henry's limited 'resource' of people he can put into his 'dream'. For example, in the Art lecture there maybe over 200 students, but Henry has only a small audience to pull characters from, that are standing by the roadside watching him die. Also, a shiny silver briefcase is shown several times throughout the movie, but this is not explained, and neither is the 'balloon' that is going to 'balloon heaven' as commented by a character in Henry's dream.
An interesting note is right at the end of the movie. In Henry's dream, Sam meets Beth, who says 'I didn't move him' as in the 'real' life she was the first person on the scene and proclaimed that she didn't move him, because you're not supposed to move them. (In the dream-world she was a psychologist who tried to help Henry but gave up, and Henry feels betrayed by her) The interesting part is that her name is not revealed until the END of the movie when Henry is already dead. She tells police officers that her name is Elizabeth while he is being carried into the Ambulance - but his eyes are wide open. Whether this means that he was in fact conscious at that time, and whether this reflects a change in the timeline of when he actually had a dream is all up for speculation.
Quotes
- "Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure.", Henry Letham, quoting the imaginary artist Tristan Reveur.
- "An elegant suicide is the ultimate work of art.", Tristan Reveur.
- "There's too much beauty to quit.", Lila.
- Henry Letham: "I burned myself."
- Sam Foster: "You burned yourself? Why?"
- Henry Letham: "Practicing for hell."
External links
"Stay (film)"