Released in 2005, “Stay” is attuned to the same self-vituperative energy that runs through “The Machinist,” released a year earlier. Henry, a young man, finds himself caught in a car accident. Following what conspired, his psychiatrist, Sam, observes residual guilt in him. The film does not follow any conventional obedience to plot and sequential development. Its carefully wrought narrative enables the audience to take a glimpse at an impossible reality, one that simultaneously looks backwards and around. What unfolds is a manifestation of conscious and unconscious mental activity.
Stay (2005) Plot Summary and Movie Synopsis:
The film opens with a car crash on the Brooklyn Bridge. A young man, Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), is seen walking away unharmed from the crash site. It then quickly shifts to the apartment of Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), a psychiatrist. Sam is visibly befuddled. He meets his patient, Henry, who is depressed and driven by paranoia. He was the one who torched the car. Henry is not happy to meet Sam and asks for his regular doctor, Beth Levy. Sam says she has been missing for a while.
Henry is a Junior at the college, majoring in Fine Arts. His ways are unsettling, as can be deduced by his way of stubbing out cigarettes on his arm, carrying a gun, and constantly complaining about hearing voices. Henry lets Dr. Sam know of his intention to kill himself next Saturday at midnight, exactly, while turning 21. He also shares the name of a girl, Athena, whom he met at a diner and planned to marry soon after.
He tells Sam that the ring he got for his partner, Lila, resembles the one he got for Athena. Henry also has a penchant for Tristan Reveur, an artist who burned all his paintings before he killed himself on his 21st birthday. Quite astonishingly, he left a one-line note: “An Elegant Suicide is the Ultimate Work of Art.” Lila, on the other hand, has tried to kill herself in the past.
Once, when Sam is playing chess with the old Dr. Leon Patterson, Henry shows up. Henry starts crying and says Leon is his dead father. Sam even visits the Letham household, where he meets Henry’s mother, Mrs. Letham. Mr. Letham mistakes him for her son. The lines between what is real and imagined are blurred as we see Sam constantly drift in and out of a befuddled state, imagining himself to be Henry. He gets bitten by Olive, the dog of the Letham household. Spaces constantly fold in and out around Sam. He experiences the same events innumerable times and meets people whom he has already met.
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Sam even meets Athena, who is an amateur theatre actress. She plays the role of Hamlet. At this juncture, it is important to realise that ‘Letham’ is an anagram of Hamlet. Athena says her favorite line of the play is: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”. The line troublingly echoes Henry’s place in the film.
The word ‘nutshell’ could refer to the limitation of space between life and death. Suspended between life and death, Henry is a man traversing infinite spaces, as the entire narrative testifies. Athena promises Sam to lead him to Henry. However, following Athena is a dangerous feat, as the staircase she goes down is infinitely spiraling. Sam loses sight of Athena. To his shock, he finds himself again entering the same room, where Athena rehearses the same lines as earlier.
Stay (2005) Movie Ending Explained:
Is Henry a real man?
The search for Henry continues till 11:33 p.m. on Saturday. Sam arrives at a bookstore frequented by Henry. In the bookstore, he finds a painting that Henry had painted. The bookstore owner says he traded the painting for some books on Tristan Reveur. The owner seems to be aware of Henry’s plan to kill himself on the bridge. It is a few minutes to 12:00, when Henry turns 21, and would follow the footsteps of his idol. Sam finds Henry on the bridge. The space surrounding them is evaporating. Henry says only Sam is real. He then shoots himself in the head.
Turns out, whatever we witnessed hitherto was a lie, or more aptly, an imagined reality. Henry is heavily injured in the car crash we see at the beginning of the film. His parents, Leon and Mrs. Letham, have died. What we see is actually Henry’s imagination while he hangs between life and death. The characters that we see throughout are random spectators of the accident, including Sam and Lila. They try to resuscitate the man, but he passes away. Before dying, Henry proposes to Lila, whom he confuses with Athena. Lila smiles and accepts. The film ends with Sam asking Lila out for coffee, as he would not be able to sleep that night after witnessing the tragedy unfolding.
Stay (2005) Movie Themes Analysed:
The symbolism of the paintings
In the film, we see Henry attending a lecture at the University on three major works of renowned painters. The inclusion of the paintings at this juncture is charged with meaning-making. The three paintings are: Pradillo Ortiz’s masterpiece, Dona Juana la Loca, Goya’s painting, The Third of May, 1808, and The Dead Toreador by Manet.
The three paintings steadily explore and interrelate themes of death and the human spirit. In Doña Juana la Loca, Joanna of Castile watches over the casket of her dead husband, Philip I of Castile. While Joanna wears a sombre expression, the crowd around her, the courtiers, are visibly nonchalant. Philip I of Castile died suddenly of typhoid fever, and it was said she carried his casket around with her everywhere, believing one day he would wake from slumber. This depicts a common ritual for her, and the courtiers’ faces all have looks of boredom and fatigue.
This is a premonition of what is to come, or rather, an indicator of what is taking place, away from the spectators’ eyes. A crowd has gathered to resuscitate Henry; while Sam and Lila try to revive him, there are varied expressions on the faces of the people surrounding them. That his death has turned into a spectacle is echoed through Manet’s The Dead Toreador. The body of the toreador seems somewhat suspended in the absence of gravity, resembling Henry’s current state. In Goya’s painting, the central figure appears Christ-like; his pose veers from a heroic pose of a common man, ready to lay his life for his country, to the crucifix pose of Christ.
“If this is a dream, the whole world’s inside it.”
Sam’s final line to Henry bears a singular meaning when he finally realizes that Henry has been on the verge of dying all along, and everything that we see is part of a contrived imagination in his mind. Underlying all the spaces and sounds that wrap around Sam and Henry, there was, however, an acute, but amused, awareness that he was dreaming. The past world melts into the present world: he sees a walrus he visited at the aquarium in the distant past, but the reflection on the glass wall is the reflection of an old couple who show rejection at the thought of the boy’s survival. Amid a welter of sight and sound from both the past and the present, Henry contemplates staying or leaving.
