Like Kurosawa armed with dueling loafs of cheesy bread, If I Stay takes out the cheese stick and beats everything to death with it. There’s tragiporn spilling from every nook, weepy-anguish souping from every cranny. It’s not enough for a family to die, they must be dealt with in one sorry, sappy blow after the next. Stretch that sadness as thin as pizza dough. Work those tear ducts like they’re 1800’s railroad laborers. Bathe it all in bathos, rinse and repeat. An exercise in wringing a stale conceit for all it’s worth, If I Stay is what happens when you turn one car crash into an entire movie.
One must presume that Gayle Forman‘s novel, on which this film is based, has captured something of the post-pubescent longing for one’s first bone sesh in ravishing detail. How else can you explain the teenybopper cult follower it’s earned? After all, Twilight has taught us by now that sexual angst, like beluga caviar, sells by the ounce. Assuming it’s similar to the film, Forman’s story throttles between two events: Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz) falling in love for the first time and all of her family bar none dying in a horrific car accident. Like pie and ice cream, this sappy romance comes with calamity a la mode.
The crash – revealed in the trailers – happens early on. So while I’m not quite laying out a major spoiler smackdown, I’ll spare you the hyper-lachrymose details and tell you that people be dying. As Mia and her stretcher-bound family speed off to the hospital director R.J. Cutler finds it the perfect time to introduce Mia’s on-again-off-again romance with Jonas Brother wanna-be Adam (Jamie Blackley). Their high school romance is spliced into the tale in long-winded, saccharine flashbacks. Because who doesn’t want their fledging romance served up with ambulance sirens and life support tubes?
Withdrawing from her physical body, Mia experiences an “out of body” trip where she watches over herself and her equally battered family members. Completely unnecessary from a narrative perspective, it allows Moretz to narrate at us in gushy, jejune “prose”. One by one, the fate dominoes fall the wrong way and she considers bailing on her own body and giving up to the great void of white light. It’s so hopelessly dramatic that I’m surprised she didn’t come down with a case of Million Dollar bedsores during her stay.
Offscreen, Cutler lathers up the melodrama like he’s hosting a Nicholas Spark car wash on a hot day. He wants so badly for you to cry, he’ll shoulder tap to remind you of just how sad everything is as often as he can. Throw up your arms and howl at the sky, Cutler’s coming fa ya tears!
But get them he shall not. In my theater, there was a grown woman weeping petulantly as the gimpy drama unfolded onscreen. When I encountered her a few days later, she admitted how cheap the shots were, how lame her tears ultimately had been. If I Stay is the amazingly bad weepy flick that’ll have people taking back their tears.
Regurgitating all the stops like from a Sparknote’s “How to Do Tragedy for Dummies”, If I Stay is a pathetically aimless attempt to weave sadness into a story. It’s so emotionally inept that it makes this year’s other tragic teenage love story – the one in which cancer-stricken 18-year olds make out in Anne Frank’s attic as tourist bystanders cheer them on – look like an Oscar contender.
I pity Mireille Enos (The Killing) who really does give it her all here, but everything about the flick is hammy past the point of pulled pork. She’s the only one who seems to try to reign in the supremely blood-and-thunder aspects of Forman’s tragiporn. Moretz goes for broke and breaks herself. Blackley is as helpless and hapless as Old Yeller. Someone put his pout down. Someone rip that earring out.
All in all, If I Stay is the feeble movie equivalent of dubstep. The only reason I can see it being worthwhile for a viewer familiar with the books is the wait for the drops. Lying in wait, accepting all the sappy mess sandwiched in between, is this what makes this heinous experiment in contrived hardship worthwhile? Does the same impulse that dictates people to thrash their head on a downbeat inspire them to want to yank their heartstrings and blubber at artificial woe? Everything is blanketed in oily snow with Heitor Pereira‘s musical score leaking sap like a maple tree.
If I Stay is the useless kind of movie for people who have nothing else to be bummed about. It invites you to wonder if people do sit around and revel in the slow reveal of dead characters? If I Stay thinks yes. I say no.
D-
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