Al's Omniflick: If I Stay

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

If I Stay

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: R.J. Cutler/Starring: Chloe Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, Jamie Blackley, Joshua Leonard and Stacy Keach

Based on the novel by Gayle Forman, If I Stay is a tardy arrival in the Summer movie season but not too late to provide teen movie audiences a needle full of sentimental syrup with a supernatural chaser to top off the fix. I avoided a blogpost for The Fault in Our Stars; the Summer's other teary bacchanalia featuring teens dealing with loss. I found it an unchallenging target though R.J. Cutler's film is pretty weak prey too. I figured I couldn't let both films escape my clutches.

I came expecting a movie but got an ABC Family drama instead. Nothing in the film is terribly upsetting; any 6-year-old could watch the film with his or her sleep patterns undisturbed and intact.

The story is rather simple. Mia Hall (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a promising cellist hoping to study music after high school. Her parents (annoyingly played by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard), who are irritatingly hip and maniacally supportive of her musical dreams, gave up their own respective musical dreams to marry and raise a family.

Chloe meets the heartthrob of her school, named Adam (Jamie Blackley). He is first seen walking through a school hallway in slo-mo as the female students swoon and cast coquettish looks his way. Mia is surprised to find herself being wooed by the young Adonis.

The fact that Adam fronts an rock band with big time ambitions is supposed to be a sharp contrast to Mia's passion for classical music. As one might divine from the plot description, the couple's disparate musical aspirations cause friction, which tests their relationship and their career goals.

A dramatic plot wrinkle unfolds on a snowy day as Mia's family are critically injured in a car accident. Mia finds herself wandering frantically around the accident site, trying to learn the fate of her family, only to find she is now a spirit. She sees her unconscious body being wheeled into an ambulance, which she follows to the hospital. As she learns the devastating news about her parents and brother, family friends and relatives arrive at the hospital to lend support.

The story then becomes a will-she-or-won't-she-survive weepy while narrowing its narrative focus to her relationship with Adam.

I can't say I was bored with the film but I was hardly sitting wide-eyed and attentive. The film really boils down to a half dozen or so confrontations between Mia and Adam in flashback, which are supposed to lend the movie a kind of urgency that never really feels all that urgent.

If I Stay is a film that allows female teens a romantic escape; one that asks would my dreamboat visit me on my deathbed and risk his dreams of stardom for little old moi? I wish the film had the fire of The Spectacular Now, which felt true to teen life with all its awkwardness, doubt and confusion. Cutler's film bears some of those qualities but they feel artificial and forced.

This is Cutler's first feature film. He is better known for his documentaries The September Issue and The World According to Dick Cheney. He brings a documentarian's matter-of-fact narrative approach to the film, which is by no means bad but the film never frees itself from the chains of straight-forwardness and stubborn attachment to emotional surfaces.

I found it implausible that someone who just lost her entire family in an auto accident (sorry about that disclosure) would be so concerned about her loverboy's presence in the hospital.

I also found it puzzling that someone like Stacy Keach would be cast in such a one-dimensional role as a grieving grandpa. He was recently seen in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For as one of the city's slithery creeps. I wished I could have switched his character in that film for his character in If I Stay. Wouldn't that give the film just a dash of delicious darkness and danger? No? Oh, well.

The film concludes with some more of that hokey, divine light stuff, which should comfort movie-goers who find If I Stay emotionally harrowing (a demographic I wouldn't care to meet). I think I liked Chloe Grace Moretz more as an ass-kicker in Kick-Ass and as Stephen King's Carrie. She will have better roles and better opportunities to flower as an actress. For now, let's forget about this one, shall we?

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On DVD

Fury (1936)

Director: Fritz Lang

Though we might normally think of the films M and Metropolis when director Fritz Lang becomes the topic of conversation, less known is the legendary director's work in Hollywood. Having fled the ever-growing menace of Nazi Germany for America in the early 1930s', Lang eventually found himself under contract for MGM.

Though his work in Hollywood is very uneven, one standout is Fury, from 1936. Starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney, the film's condemnation of mob justice seems spectacularly daring now, considering lynching was still a reality in Depression-era America. We don't see one black person in the film entire but we know precisely for whom Lang film is sympathetic.

Spencer Tracy plays Joe Wilson, who is arrested in a small town while en route to meet his fiance, Katherine (Sylvia Sydney). Suspected of being part of a kidnapping of a little girl, Wilson is arrested on the flimsiest evidence. While he sits in cell; angry and indignant, Katherine is puzzled as to why her fiance hasn't arrived at their prearranged meeting place.

But Wilson's fortunes take a darker and more dangerous turn when a mob--already on edge--is roused to anger. Egging one another on, the mob moves on the jailhouse where Wilson is being held. As the angry gathering becomes a mass, drawing citizens of the town into their swelling numbers, a lynch-mob begins to form. The sheriff, determined to see due process take its course, refuses their forceful demands. Becoming angrier and angrier and bolder and bolder, the crowd storms the jail, overwhelming the sheriff and his deputies. Unable to unlock the cell doors to reach Wilson, the mob sets the jailhouse ablaze as an alternate method of lynching.

Katherine, having arrived on the scene, faints when she sees flames engulf the cell where her fiance is held.

In spite of the mob acting as a faceless entity, its principle members are brought to trial though the town and the defendants maintain a conspiracy of silence, hoping to escape convictions and censure.

A sure acquittal seems imminent until damning evidence assures their guilt. When the majority of the members receive death sentences, Wilson turns up at his brothers, having survived the fire. Knowing the public is unaware of his survival, he vows to stay in hiding to ensure the mob conspirators are executed.

The scene where Katherine, nearly insane from grief, comes face to face with Joe is a powerful moment in the film. As she slowly recovers from her state, she realizes Joe's vindictive determination to see the mob hang is in itself a great injustice.

The story climaxes during a stirring courtroom scene that brings the fascinating story to a close.

I would have never expected Hollywood to make a statement as powerful as Fury made in 1936. Given the fact that lynchings in America at the time went unpunished, the movie railed bravely, in spite of the main character being white rather than black, against what was then the status quo. The Oxbow Incident would make a similar and commensurately powerful statement seven years later.

The film's willingness to peer into the darker side of American life could be partly attributed to Lang, who co-wrote the story and who was no stranger to exploring the darker side of humanity. Having seen evil flower in his home country, it makes sense Lang would choose to tell this story.

Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney give wonderful, emotionally layered performances. Katherine's near descent into madness is depicted touchingly by Sydney. To see Tracy's mild-mannered Wilson become angry and vengeful is heartbreaking.

Even watching Lang's film on a small screen does little to diminish its power. Weeks after the viewing, I still can't shake its indelible images or its angry indictment of one of America's great crimes. One couldn't devise a better title than one it was given eighty years ago. Fury indeed.