R.J. Cutler’s If I Stay has one idea and spends 106 minutes deciding not to use it. Mia Hall, a seventeen-year-old cellist played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is thrown into a coma by a car wreck and left suspended between living and dying. That is the whole engine. The film’s job is to make the choice mean something. It mostly makes it pretty.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Chloë Grace Moretz and the Cello
Moretz is the reason to watch. Her Mia is the film’s one steady thing, and the praise she drew is the only near-unanimous note in an otherwise sour reception. She plays a girl who has already learned to want two incompatible lives: Juilliard, and Adam Wilde, a rock singer and guitarist played by Jamie Blackley. The movie understands that a seventeen-year-old can hold both, and that choosing is the hard part.
A Snow Day and a Truck
The setup is small and good. A snow day announcement on the radio frees Mia’s teacher father Denny, played by Joshua Leonard. Her travel agent mother Kat, played by Mireille Enos, takes a sick day. The whole family drives to her grandparents’ farm. Then the Halls’ car collides with an oncoming truck.
Mia watches her family’s unconscious bodies on the road. Paramedics work. She asks what is happening. Nobody answers. She rides in the ambulance to the hospital, where her body goes into surgery, and a nurse whispers that it is up to her whether she fights to stay alive.
Shauna Cross and the Between
Shauna Cross wrote the script from Gayle Forman’s 2009 novel. The out-of-body mechanic is the film’s best and worst idea. It gives Mia a vantage point on her own ruin, and it gives the film an excuse to drift. She sees her grandparents outside a pediatric room where her brother Teddy lies in a coma-like state. Adam arrives at the hospital and is not allowed in.
That last detail is the cruelest thing in the movie, and it lands without much help. Cutler keeps the camera gentle and the score busier than the scene needs.
Adam Wilde and Willamette Stone
The backstory carries more weight than the present tense. Young Mia met Adam in the school music room. They dated. His band Willamette Stone signed to a label. She completed a successful Juilliard audition. Both good news, which is the point: their relationship strained under the weight of two futures arriving at once. They broke up on mutual terms, neither wanting to hold the other back.
Stacy Keach as Gramps and Gabrielle Rose as Gran do quiet work the script does not always earn.
The Numbers Behind If I Stay
The film grossed $78.9 million worldwide against an $11 million budget. Warner Bros. released it on August 22, 2014, after a New York premiere on August 18. The reviews were generally negative, and the Rotten Tomatoes consensus — “more manipulative than moving” — is the right call.
Here is what that consensus misses. If I Stay is not manipulative in the way a cheap weepie is manipulative. It is indecisive. It stacks a coma, an unconscious family, a lost boyfriend and a Juilliard audition, then refuses to pick which one hurts most. Moretz picks. The movie does not.
The tagline is “Live for Love.” The film is too timid to argue with it.
The Hard Numbers
- Title: If I Stay (2014)
- Director: R.J. Cutler
- Writer: Shauna Cross, from Gayle Forman’s 2009 novel
- Runtime: 106 minutes
- Genre: Science fiction romantic drama
- Budget: $11 million
- Worldwide gross: $78.9 million
- Metacritic: 46/100
- Score: 4.6 of 10
Dates and Running Order
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| August 18, 2014 | New York premiere |
| August 22, 2014 | Warner Bros. theatrical release |
| 106 minutes | Runtime |
What the Coma Cannot Fix
The premise asks one question: does Mia stay? The film answers by showing us everything she would lose, then declining to weigh it. Adam outside the hospital door, not allowed in, is the sharpest image in the picture because it is the only one where the choice costs someone besides Mia.
That is the movie If I Stay should have been. It has Moretz, a clean premise and a genuine dilemma. It uses about half of each.
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