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As Sheherazade and the hero of Jorge Luis Borges’s story "The Secret Miracle" have demonstrated, storytelling can not only delay the inevitable, it can also make the interim a lot more rewarding. Some such philosophy seems to underlie Marc Forster’s provocative and perplexing new film. It opens with a "homage" to the opening of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, a car crash shot from the point of view of the vehicle’s balky wheel. In the apparent aftermath, Henry (Ryan Gosling), one of those Werther-like arty types, kneels by a blazing SUV in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. He’ll become the patient of Sam (Ewan McGregor), a primly rationalist psychiatrist just waiting for his comeuppance. Henry tells Sam he’ll kill himself next Saturday, on his 21st birthday, then takes a powder, leaving Sam in the lurch. Sam doesn’t take this lightly; his girlfriend Lila (Sanskrit for "illusion") is also a self-destructive artist whom he saved from a suicide attempt. But Lila (Naomi Watts, an old hand at navigating these waters after Mulholland Drive) has learned from her experience; she tries to settle down these seething psyches by reminding everyone that the world is too beautiful to leave. But what world is it? Things are not as they seem. They’re not even as they don’t seem. Forster uses exhausting editing ploys — match cuts, dissolves, and some morphing elisions no doubt cooked up in a computer — that, compounded with a diabolically surreal set design, hammer home the possibility that Sam and Henry might be mysteriously linked! So Sam tries to track down the truth about the elusive Henry. One lead takes him to a beautiful woman rehearsing Hamlet. "I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space," she intones, "were it not that I have bad dreams," Boy, does Stay have bad dreams. Not many films indulge so greedily in the REM state of mind. Someone steps out of a doctor’s office and into a giant dome with sunlight blazing through an oculus; another walks into a dark room with windows peering into a tank filled with frolicking walruses. And in one of many such scenes, a mad flight down a spiral stairwell comes abruptly to a dead end. That’s the problem: these flurries are all dead ends. True, many motifs are repeated — the walruses show up later in Lila’s paintings. And they all seem to draw on some gaudy textbook of archetypes. But as smugly as these clues insist on a solution, they never add up; they’re a school of red herrings. It’s clear Stay is just hanging around for the requisite 90 minutes; what it really wants is to follow that white light at the top of the dome. So what’s left behind? Is Forster’s film a tour de force bravely exploring the limits of reality, illusion, and identity? Does it, like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, want to expose the shortcomings of reason and promote the superiority of faith? Or is it, as one character suggests, just an elaborate song and dance designed to get a date? Maybe it’s all three. But despite its hokum, Stay will linger in your mind.
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