R.J. Cutler’s If I Stay is pitched squarely to teenage
girls, of which I am not, who are susceptible to melodramatic plots and doomed
love stories. Though I fall firmly out
of this demographic, that’s not to say that I couldn’t enjoy or become engaged
with a film dealing with a bright young woman on the verge of making some major
life decisions who must reevaluate her priorities when tragedy strikes. I’m certainly not above any genre exercise
that’s rendered with a modicum of intelligence and brought to life with genuine
emotion, as this is the key to making any sort of engaging entertainment. And then there’s “If I Stay.”
Chloe Grace Moretz is Mia Hall, a young woman who has the
world at her feet yet lacks the confidence to grasp all of the opportunities
that lay before her. Smart, beautiful
and a top-notch cellist, she’s unsure as to if she should leave Portland,
Oregon to pursue her dream of concert hall stardom or hang around to follow
after her musician boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley) who’s on the verge of pop
superstardom. However, all of this takes
a backseat when Mia and her family are involved in a car accident that sends
her into a deep coma. However, her
consciousness becomes stuck in some sort of limbo as she’s able to observe all
that’s going on about her while her life hangs in the balance. As she learns the fate of her family members
and sees how this tragedy is affecting her friends and grandparents, she’s
forced to make a decision – should she stay on this mortal plain to live her
no-guarantee-of-success life or move on to the realm of the afterlife, knowing
only that it’s really, really bright there?
Sillier premises have proved effective but the way Cutler
handles this material dooms it from the start.
Every character is an idealized version of a real person, none of them
coming off as real or genuine in any way, shape or form. You could easily dispense with the names of
all the characters as Mia’s mother and father
(Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard) could be referred to as “the cool
parents,” her brother (Jakob Davies) as “the lovable younger sibling,” Adam as
“the too-cool-to-be-believed boyfriend” and her best friend (Liana Liberato) as
“the quirky sidekick.” No one in the cast, with the exception of Stacy Keach as
Mia’s grandfather, manages to provide any shadings of character or human
behavior. They’re all playing types of
people, nothing more.
Even Moretz, who I think is a very talented actress, isn’t
immune to this as nearly every scene she’s in is played a bit too broadly, a
bit too obviously. Some of the blame for
this lies on Cutler’s shoulders for not guiding her towards a more subtle turn,
but the script does her no favors either, saddling her with horribly written
voice-over narration while the lines of dialogue she’s forced to speak are
simplistic to the point of being insulting.
The film is based on a novel by Gayle Forman, who’s built
her career in the world of young adult literature by writing for readers much
like her protagonist here and while her novels have sold well, the writing in
them is of questionable quality, like so many other works of this sort. While I
have no problem with this author making an honest dollar, the fact that her
works are embraced by young readers as good literature and in turn their film
adaptations seen as good movies is troubling.
The bar on what is considered fine art has fallen drastically over the
course of the last decade and if this generation comes to see movies and novels
such as If I Stay as worthy storytelling, this is a slippery slope that opens
the door to shoddy storytelling being the norm, which does nothing but lessen
us all in the end.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2014.
