If I Stay Review

When I read Gayle Forman's If I Stay earlier this year, I wondered throughout how such a flashback-heavy story with a largely passive protagonist could make the leap to the big screen.  At the time, I didn't realize that the film adaptation was already happening, and was being released this very year.  Then the trailer played before The Fault in Our Stars and, to my surprise, it looked like the tricky source material was going to make the leap with grace, and Chloe Grace Moretz.

However, R.J. Cutler's adaptation of the young adult weepie is, unfortunately, dead on arrival.  Many of the film's shortcomings are inherited from the source material, as is often the case in adaptation, but it is not an excuse.  This is a faithful film, recreating many of the novel's most memorable and emotional scenes, sometimes with great success, but faithfulness does not a good movie make.  Perhaps it's appropriate that If I Stay is such a comatose slog. It mirrors its protagonist's plight: Mia (Moretz) must decide whether to return to the land of the living or pass onto whatever comes next following a tragic car accident that leaves her almost alone in the world.

That Mia has the power to decide is, naturally, whispered into her ear by a wise black nurse, not once, but twice, just in case the audience missed it the first time.  It's only one instance of the film breaking the golden rule of movie storytelling: If I Stay tells much more than it shows.  There's plenty of voiceover narration, which is understandable given the numerous flashbacks.  But Mia's commentary often veers into The Host Territory, where it feels like you're watching the movie alongside a movie talker who thinks you're really dumb, or maybe blind.

If I Stay is weighed down with the emotional baggage of being a teenager in love.  Mia is a cellist in a family of rockers who catches the eye - because of her musical passion, of course - of band frontman Adam (Jaimie Blackley).  Despite their different musical interests, they form an unlikely couple, though there isn't much basis for the relationship.  Adam tells Mia that he loves her because of how playing the cello transforms her, and how beautiful she is.  It's not the most substantial romantic foundation.  But Moretz and Blackley are game in their roles, smoldering as much as their characters' mellow dispositions allow, and kissing whenever there's a moment of silence.  It's the dumb, heavy love that fills high school hallways and makes adults roll their eyes.

Much is made of music in the film, what with Adam's band rising to local prominence and Mia scoring an audition for Juilliard.  The characters often wax poetic, and often approach the land of pretense, but the cast mostly delivers their musings sincerely.  It helps that Blackley has such a nice voice, that the soundtrack is finely curated, and that Moretz looks like a seasoned cellist.  I don't know whether the actress has any training on the instrument, but the fact that her performance makes me think she might is a testament to something done right.

But allow me to use a musical metaphor to explain exactly why If I Stay falls so short.  Cutler figures out which sorts of scenes he can direct: mopey romantic half-arguments between Mia and Adam, touching/funny scenes with the family, scenes of Mia racing through the hospital on the hunt for her loved ones, and scenes of musical performance.  Once he masters these notes, he keeps returning to them, never mixing them in interesting ways, but rather coming around again and again to scenes that are barely even variations on their predecessors.  If I Stay is the cinematic equivalent of a skipping record.  It's the same old song played ad nauseum, which saps the film of most of its emotional punch, and makes what pathos remains feel unearned.  Such a clumsily handled tale doesn't deserve my tears.

From its bleak Northwestern vistas to its morose characters to its lose-lose climactic choice, If I Stay is a repetitive gauntlet of teenage angst.  Watching Cutler's film is like going back in time to two really unpleasant hours of my youth.  Why anyone would want to take such a glum trip is beyond me.