Stay is one of those I-dreamed-I-was-dreaming movies, reality and illusion so blurred together that you finally give up trying to separate them. You also start to realize that the whole movie is an illusion, a dream in search of a dreamer. Normally, I would hate being trapped inside someone else's dream; it's bad enough just listening to someone describe things that are, by definition, peculiar to them. But director Marc Foster, who brought us Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, two movies that left me cold, gets the juices flowing this time around. Scenes melt into one another, everything in them a possible clue to what's going on. We may not ever know where we're at, but we don't really mind being there.
Actually, we appear to be in New York City. And that guy wearing all the tweed is Ewan McGregor, a psychiatrist who's just taken on a new patient, a suicidally depressed artist (Ryan Gosling) who announces his intention to end it all three days hence. But is the patient a figment of the psychiatrist's imagination? Or is the psychiatrist a figment of the patient's imagination? Or are they both figments of someone else's imagination ' the psychiatrist's girlfriend (Naomi Watts), perhaps, who just happens to have once been a suicidally depressed artist? I must confess, I literally nodded off a couple of times while wandering through Stay's convoluted plot. Or was I dreaming I was awake the rest of the time? Either way, I seem to have enjoyed myself.
