Review: If I Stay

Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz) is just a girl thinking about the cello, Adam (Jamie Blackley), and an acceptance letter from Juilliard. At the end of the intended tearjerker If I Stay, she is still thinking about those same things though now burdened with making a literal life or death decision.

Mia and her family have been left comatose following a car accident. The meat of the movie follows Mia's spirit as she runs up and down hospital corridors trying to suss out her family's fate while also flashing back to happier times when she was just an ordinary girl dealing with the usual teenage problems. Shy and introverted, she's the black sheep of her family: her dad (Joshua Leonard) is a former punk rocker, her mom (Mireille Enos) is a bohemian rock chick; even her little brother Teddy (Jakob Davies) would rather listen to Iggy Pop than her favoured Bach or Beethoven.

She meets the older and basically orphaned Adam, an up-and-coming musician who romances her in between out-of-town gigs. Uneasy and insecure in his world of bar gigs and seemingly wordly hangers-on, she questions if she's enough for him. Of course, he insists, he loves her as she is - a declaration that incites her to offer up her virginity. Any nervousness she has is appeased by Adam suggesting she "think of it like we're playing music together." That is a seriously vomit-inducing line which Blackley cannot make work. Coupled with their non-existent chemistry and typical shots of them smiling, laughing and skipping stones against Portland's snowy gloom, it's tempting to wish he had been another passenger on that fateful car ride.

The truth of the matter is I cared not a whit if Mia lived or died. There was nothing in either the back story or the present day situation that engaged my interest or sympathy. If I Stay unspools at such a stilted and muted pace and with such pedestrian execution that it quickly becomes unaffecting and unforgivably boring. Compare that with the far more superior and wrenching The Fault in Our Stars, another YA novel turned film bearing similar themes; Gayle Forman's novel would have been better left unadapted.

Moretz is a surprisingly dull presence here considering her past work. It may be that Mia is too normal a character for the actress to play, so used is she to less vanilla roles. Stacy Keach, as her grandfather, is the one good thing about the film, conveying more emotion in his few minutes of screen time than the rest of the film can muster.

If I Stay

Directed by: R.J. Cutler

Written by: Shauna Cross; adapted from Gayle Forman's novel

Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Mireille Enos, Jamie Blackley, Joshua Leonard, Stacy Keach, Liana Liberato, Gabrielle Rose, Jakob Davies