If I Stay ** (2014, Chloë Grace Moretz, Jamie Blackley) – Movie Review

The 17-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz plays brilliant budding classical cellist Mia Hall who has a car crash while out driving with her mother, father and brother. She wakes up on the road only to see her family crushed and herself in a coma, and, during her out-of-body experience, she gets in the ambulance with herself being rushed to hospital.

There her loving extended family of friend and loved ones, including Gramps (Stacy Keach) and finally her estranged boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley), gather round her comatose body, while she wanders around the hospital observing and thinking, trying to make up her mind whether to stay on Earth or go towards the light. As she ponders her life so far, we see it unfolding in flashback, while she struggles with whether there’s enough left for her in this world to think it’s worth staying.

Director R J Cutler’s film of Gayle Forman’s bestselling teen novel is well made and well acted but it’s shamefully manipulative, playing wrongly on everybody’s fears – sometimes terrors – of loss, abandonment and death of loved ones. This is particularly unsuitable for a movie directed at sensitive 12 to 14-year-olds. It will appeal to The Fault in Our Stars fans, because it’s similar exploitative material handled in a similar way. But it’s not a really good thing to have around.

Mia and Adam seem made for each other, but their career paths are taking them in different directions – she to New York’s Julliard School, he back home in Portland where his rock career is beginning to take off. They fight and separate. But, of course, they can’t really live without each other. This is the story’s real subject – the fragility of first love, and its apparent life or death significance when you’re a young kid. It seems to be about mortality and life’s impermanence and the fragile thread our lives are hanging on, but that’s not it at all. Kids think they’re immortal. The story’s not about a heroine one heartbeat away from dying – though it tells you it is – it’s all about whether she can keep her boy.

So, then, the film’s well made and well acted. Veteran doc-maker Cutler makes it look smart and takes it all at so-serious face value. Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard are excellent as Mia’s parents, with surprisingly chunky roles for adults in a teen movie, and Keach brings conviction and feeling to a tricky role. But the normally feisty Moretz and Blackley are irritatingly sulky, sullen and uncharismatic, though to be fair they are entirely brisk and professional, delivering what is required of them. Playing Mia can not be judged a good move for Moretz. She should stick to kicking ass.

The flashback scenes are neatly done, decently written and nicely played. All quite smart and tidy, it’s a clean job of work. But the all-important hospital sequences with the celestial glow and angel choirs and singing bedside tunes are a total turnoff.

[Spoiler alert] It would have be much nicer, and much more subtle, to have had an open ending. But that would have left the path open for If I Stay 2. Heaven forfend!

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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