Michael Suarez
Life is but a dream.
— traditional song
There are two central characters in 2005’s Stay, but they are both the same person. If this is a spoiler, I am sorry, but to tackle the ideas in this 20-year-old film requires some serious deconstruction into what happens in Stay, and that means looking closely at both Ewan McGregor’s Dr. Sam Foster and Ryan Gosling’s Henry Letham. In fact, it might actually mean looking at every single character in the film, or perhaps just a few.
Stay was quite the emotional film for me when I first saw it on DVD nearly 20 years ago, and as I’ve aged, it only moves me more with each passing year. This is because although it’s a film about a young man’s final moments before dying, it’s actually about all of our relationships with death. Some of us die of natural causes. Others will die by accident or by suicide. Some will die young, while others will die middle-aged or elderly. The great equalizer, one day, each and every one of us will die.
This has been on my mind every single day for the past several years, and although it can bring me anxiety, more often than not, it results in some critical thinking about the life I’ve made for myself. I think about Henry’s plan to take his own life. It prompts Sam to find the young man to prevent it from happening, but what can he possibly do to stop it? What can any of us do to save people? We ought to do something, right? One has to do something.
Sam wanders this strange world of the film looking for Henry, and what a world it is! Though on the surface it could be seen as style over substance, there’s a reason why the movie looks the way it does, Dutch angles and all.
In the film’s final moments, we are shown that everything leading up to this has been a dream world constructed by Henry in his final moments of life. The real Henry did not kill himself. He was driving a car and had an accident. That accident killed his would-be fiancée, as well as both of his parents. We see spectators, and they all had roles in the film we just witnessed. Figments of Henry’s mind, yes? Sam and Lila are two people by his side as he passes. They are closest to him. It’s no wonder they play bigger roles in his final dream.
But what of his love, Athena? For that matter, are his parents a part of his imagination as well? Is his dream space some form of an afterlife, a limbo for the mind? If so, how can dying souls share the same space with people who are still alive? It can get complicated. However, I don’t believe for one second that it’s the film’s fault. These questions are good ones, and we should be asking them.
The film is all from Henry’s point of view. It must be. He’s the one dying, and he’s the one who seems to have populated his final dream with the faces he’s seeing as he passes. The filmmaking backs this up. There are not a lot of cuts in the film. A lot of the time, we move from scene to scene smoothly, as the environment (or even character) from one moment morphs into something (or someone) else in the next. We even see a filmmaking rule broken early in the film, as Sam and Henry face one another in Sam’s office.
The camera shoots them in profile. To establish the proper blocking, since they are facing one another. One character faces right, and the other faces left. However, there is a strange cut that sees both characters facing the same direction, telling the viewer, “Hey, they’re the same person.” When Henry morphs into Sam, it’s not simply a scene transition. It’s telling the viewer the same thing again. Henry and Sam are the same person. As for the environments merging, that has to do with telling the viewer that what is being shown is not realistic and shouldn’t be. Frankly, when the world begins to fall apart in the film’s second half, it’s not at all jarring. The entire film feels otherworldly, and it should.
Director Marc Forster was one of my favorite directors from the aughts. I loved Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Kite Runner. He was interesting and didn’t make the same film twice. In Stay, Forster used modern effects in the service of the story, such as moving from one location to another relatively seamlessly. It’s smart filmmaking, in my opinion.
I also must give props to writer David Benioff, whom I loved for writing 25th Hour a few years before this movie. (It would be some time before Game of Thrones arrived.) He manages the task of telling a very heightened story in a very heightened way, all the while not sacrificing character. Yes, it can certainly be argued that most of the characters in Stay are meaningless because they don’t exist, but the thing I would argue is that they do exist. Even as figments of Henry’s imagination, they still populate Henry’s mind. They are Henry.
Sam and Lila share the kind of dark, messy love that clearly resides inside of Henry. Do they represent the kind of relationship Henry shared with Athena? Possibly. What of Lila’s own dealings with suicide? Given that Henry faces down the act of taking his life at the end, I have to wonder if this is Henry coming to terms with thoughts he had while he was still alive? Was he ever suicidal? Did he ever do it? Is Lila that part of him? Perhaps Henry had the kind of heart Sam clearly has, making it his mission to find Henry before he jumps off the bridge.
How likely is it that Henry had Sam and Lila in him? Very likely. I suppose I only have my own opinion to rely on, but I have some versions of Sam and Lila in me. I wonder if I believe, as Henry does, that two such people inside of me can co-exist. I like to believe that they can. It would prove that I have multitudes. Don’t we all?
Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts are so good as Sam and Lila, but Ryan Gosling is a revelation here, giving one of his career-best performances. It’s fascinating to watch him walk through what he believes is life, followed by a dream, and eventually limbo, on his way to the afterlife. He plays Henry as a young man coming to terms with the life he lived, the responsibility of the losses he had, and the life he is close to losing.
Is the end of Stay a cheat? Does it really come down to, “Oh, he was dying the entire time”? Well, to be fair, yes. However, I don’t consider this a bad thing. My appreciation for a movie has less to do with what happens than what it’s about, and what Stay is ultimately about has spoken to me over the past two decades.
There is a question being asked: Should you try to save someone, even if there’s a very good chance it will be for naught? The film says, “Yes,” and I agree. The majority of the movie is about Sam trying to find Henry before the latter’s suicide can happen. Even though his journey takes him to strange places and he’s forced to confront his and Lila’s own troubled past, Sam doesn’t give up. In the end, the real-world person with Sam’s face and voice was there for him, even though the real Henry’s life was far from being saved. Sometimes, it’s essential to be there for people. We cannot save everyone, but we can try.
2005’s Stay is about that. For all its gritty, R-rated atmosphere and adult themes, it’s an incredibly sincere movie. It imagines the idea that we wander through some form of purgatory that takes place in our minds moments before we die. We meet people we love, and we populate the world inside our minds with individuals we encountered in life. We do all of this in order to confront ourselves and accept what has happened. I’m not sure I believe this kind of thing to be true, but I cannot deny how much the idea makes me feel…something.
Stay brings me to tears whenever I revisit it, but not because the film ends sad or happy. It’s because the film ends Henry’s story and sets up a possible new story with the real Sam and Lila, whoever these real people may be. Do I believe they will end up a couple, brought together by a tragic night the two shared with a young man who died after being involved in a car accident? No. I don’t. But I recognize the other thing the film tells us.
The end will come, and when we die, it’ll be like the end of the world, at least for the world that exists within us. Still, we know the truth, don’t we? Life will go on without us, and we will most likely never know where the next chapter will go.
Henry and Sam, then, can still be the same person. Henry’s youth died in that accident, replaced by an older version of himself who survived. Sam gets to go on, eventually being replaced by an older version. And so on. Because life goes on. With or without us. There’s comfort in that idea, but at the same time, it sucks, doesn’t it? If only we could stay. Because life is not a dream; it’s life. Until it isn’t. And, well, that’s okay.
