If I Stay
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Films, DiNovi Pictures, MGM, and New Line Cinema
Melodrama has been defined and filmed from the inception of this medium, to now. It has often been attributed to the interests of women, sometimes even being called a "women's film." Some would argue that there's good melodrama ("Terms of Endearment," "Random Harvest.") and bad melodrama ("Lifetime" movies). This film falls into the latter, trying to merge supernatural romance and melodrama.
From the description and trailer of this film, it seems to be about a girl stuck between two dimensions, and needs to decide for herself whether or not she wants to wake from her coma and live her life or die. In a perfect world this would yield a riveting performance from Moretz and deal with the complexities of the human condition. Instead, this present is undercut by flashbacks of what Mia's (Moretz) life was like before the accident. These flashbacks center around Mia’s on-again-off-again relationship with boyfriend Adam (Blackley), which pushes the film more towards relationship drama than supernatural drama. Though much of what makes this a tearjerker lies in Mia's ties to her family (and is the main conflict within the film) the action keeps coming back to this relationship. The film tries to show that their love is pure, using the family’s accident as a counterbalance, which is all sorts of emotional manipulation (in a bad way).
These kind of supernatural/otherworldly romances have been pretty common in recent years, probably spurred by the rising fame of "Twilight." If we're looking at present action, not much actually happens throughout this film besides death in general. In the ghost world that Mia inhabits she can only see what is clearly happening in front of her, and this only serves to push her farther towards the heavenly light of the afterlife. There's really no reason for her to be in this purgatory state. This seems to be a story about these two doomed lovers who need to come back together rather than a girl coming to grips with her family’s traumatic accident. The flashbacks flesh out the characters and make us feel for them, but the cuts back to present make that emotional connection waver and die off, so we can have our main love interests interact. If you've read the book, or are looking for a simple love story set in supernatural circumstances than this film will serve as a good guilty pleasure, but otherwise it lacks substance.
