'If I Stay' - Review

If I Stay, based on a novel by Gayle Forman, follows the story of Mia, (Chloë Grace Moretz) a young cellist who is involved in a car accident along with her younger brother and parents. Upon regaining consciousness, she finds herself out of her own body as an invisible voyeur of the preceding events. Following her comatose body to hospital and witnessing her family dying, she has to make the decision to stay in this world or leave it. In the process of her dilemma, Mia reflects on the two years that lead to the event, focusing on her relationship with punk-rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley).

Now you’ll notice that in that introduction, I’ve done very little to set up any of the other characters and to that extent I’ve remained faithful to the spirit of the film, because it is one of the most disgustingly self-centred things I have ever seen. When she isn’t looking back on her own soppy relationship, Mia is left wandering the hospital watching as hordes of people come to visit her comatose body, telling her how much she means to all of them. I got so fed up having to watch nothing but her problems for the first hour that when it got to her memory of an argument with her boyfriend I neither knew nor cared who was in the right.

Then we get to the issue that in terms of the teen romance drama, it is formulaic in the extreme, save for the boyfriend, where the ‘white guy with an acoustic guitar’ trope has been radically re-invented as ‘white guy with an electric guitar’. The clichéd set-pieces include the usual ‘first meeting that is supposed to be sweet but in real life would be creepy as sin’ and ‘then they made love for the first time and it was the most perfect moment ever’, but these are somehow made even worse by the voiceover delivered by our heroine that makes the romantic dialogue in Attack of the Clones sound like Shakespearean sonnets.

Sadly the premise for the film – which could be used to create some dark and subversive, genre-altering piece – is utterly wasted and the supposedly emotional intensity is offset horribly by a visual style where everything shines with some effervescent light but then occasionally aims for some kind of realistic aesthetic. If you’ve read my review of What If then you’ll remember that I took issue with the fact that everyone looks too perfect, and for that I apologise because that film has nothing on If I Stay, where even someone who has been hospitalised in a car accident is beautifully made-up with hair that has apparently been kept in suspended animation to look as good as possible.

Now, I realise that I am not the intended target audience for this film, and that many of the issues may be inherent in the source novel, but that is no excuse for the level of pandering this film makes to straight teenage girls. There’s the ‘a little bit roguish’ but ‘hiding a soft centre’ boyfriend who of course is perfectly muscled and plays in a hip rock band and who will always be there for you, plus the family who will change their entire life plans in order to make you happy, but who are almost entirely forgotten about once the accident has taken its toll.

If I Stay is nothing more than a simpering vanity project for Chloë Grace Moretz, who I normally really like as an actress and serves only to enforce the depressing state of the teen romance drama. For some of its target audience it must be working because there were audible sobs in the screening attended, but there was a small glimmer of hope after all as said screening came to an end: a pair of teenage girls sat behind me sighed in annoyance very loudly and were the first to hurry out as the credits rolled.

1 star