Has anyone seen the movie "Stay" with ryan gossling, ewan mcgregor and naomi watts?

Question

I just finished watching it and i didnt really understand the ending i was just wondering if anyone has seen it and could explain it for me. Thanks.

Answer 1

Spoilers below!

The entire movie was his imagination.. what he see's as he is dying. He was driving so he feels guilty, but he's not coherent enough to understand.. he was delusional.. but, to make it more interesting a narritive, they filmed it from the point of view of one of the "characters" in the delusion (who all happen to be people he can see while he's lying on the pavement.. right down to the kid with the balloon)..


They only part I don't understand is the shrink's clothes.. I thought it was due to the way the guy was squatting next to him, but.. watching that last scene not once do his clothes ride up.. (if you watch from the beginning the doctor's clothes don't fit correctly.. about 3 inches too short).. Seeing that it is not a factor in the last scene I'm not sure I get it.. but. it was a great movie anyway.

Answer 2

ok, so I started writing a reply to you, then my computer crashed and i lost it...sooooooo... what I am going to do is copy and paste a blog I wrote about this movie back in october of 2005......

it's long...and it has spoilers....but alas i don't feel like typing everything again...lol...


here you go:


Stay


So my friend Jamie and I went out for his birthday tonight. Nothing big, he just wanted to watch a movie. We saw something I've been wanting to see called Stay. EXCELLENT movie. It was beautiful. However it's not your run of the mill, strictly entertainment movie for the masses, it actually requires you to use your noggin and see beyond things. It's a fractured story that relies on you to put the pieces together. It's really an arthouse flick that runs along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Vanilla Sky. The imagery and ambiance are incredible. The acting is above average, and the story itself has so much impact, and is SO well written.



Ok, so here is the point where if you actually want to see this movie, and don't want to know any plot points or revelations, you should stop reading.





I've always loved the beauty of simple things. The things in life that we tend to take for granted. The things that get lost in the force and momentum of our everyday hustle. I've written about it numerous times in the past. How the little things, the feelings, the emotions, the simple look of something...the beauty of it, the frailness, the harshness, the simplicity....the memories in those small details.....are the composition,the sum total of our entire lives. It's all MEMORY...and that's it. Thing is....memory is a POWERFUL thing. A simple smell can transport you back to a certain time when you were a kid, The way light looks when it filters through tree limbs can make you instantly remember some summer day. A time when you were doing this, and feeling this, and you were with this person....it makes you remember love, and hate and all other sorts of emotions, and links these things together in your mind until the day you die. Memory is also subjective. You'll remember the things the way they played out in your point of view, and with the feelings and connotations that you deduced from the things that you did, or saw etc. As time goes by, most memories also begin to fade somewhat, and then when you think back of them....it's in an almost dreamlike way. The links will always be there, but sometimes, you may not even be aware of why you linked these two particular things together in your head to begin with. You may not understand why the image of say... salted streets in winter, overwhelms you and makes you want to cry, you just know that for some reason it does. (yeah I am using personal references) Anyways...I'm just trying to illustrate some things that the movie was trying to convey, which just happens to be something that has fascinated me for a long time. It gets much more in depth and complex, and if you really stop to think about it, it'll boggle your mind. Put both the power of memory and the power of the mind together, and you could go on forever with the possibilities.

The movie plays on both of these powers of memory and mind. It also blurs the lines between life and death, and time in general. The past is the present,is the future.

Forgive me. The more I think about the movie, the deeper my analyzing goes until I feel like i've looked at all the angles, and all the possibilities. Everytime I see a movie that stirs me, I wind up pondering it for days,just letting my mind wrap around it. This tends to be a habit for me in many ways. The more I think, the more frustrated I get with the fact that no matter what I do, I will never be able to convey the beauty of what i've seen.

At any point in the movie, you don't really know what is going on, or what is real. At first you see this guy that's been in a car accident, and whom now you assume is getting counciling for the trauma of it. Soon though, you realize that it's not that simple. Nothing is truly clear, and images are choppy and don't fit together. One thing becomes another and then another thing, day is night is day. At first I thought that the main character had split personalities, but then I threw that idea away. Everything becomes dreamlike, and in the end it's blatantly clear that you aren't in reality, but rather, in a subjective view of reality. This is what I believe happened in the movie...

You know how they say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes?? Well...the entire movie was this mans life flashing before his eyes. He's in a state between life and death, and that's why all the lines are blurred. The people that are around him trying to help, are actually placed into his memories. The images he sees, become part of his past, and his emotions. His feelings of guilt over an accident, make him believe that he's killed his family, so that memory is played out as if it were real. He's laying there dying, and all these things are happeneing around him, and all these things, and sights, and sounds, and emotions, and feelings, and memories are in his head....but they are all blurring and bleeding together. He knows he's dying, so he thinks that he's commiting suicide. He sees the doctors face, and fixates on it as the one thing he knows is real....and that transfers to him believing the doctor to be his saviour, the person against his suicide. His mind is taking in so many things at once, and he's remembering and feeling so many things at once, so everything becomes one. The past, the present, and the future. They did this so seamlessly. Right down to the small details, it was amazing. In the end you have this beautiful mosaic rendering of a life in front of you. It's so delicate, yet soooooo powerful. Brings the beauty of life and all it's glory right into your very core, stirs your senses and shakes your mind awake and alive. Yes call me dramatic....I wholeheartedly agree.....and thank god for it. Without imagination, life would be extremely boring. Poetry,Art,Film,Music,Writing....etc... none of that would exist without an active and creative mind. This movie totally struck a chord in me. I just wish that I had some people to debate about it with.....

anyone???
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ok... that was the blog I wrote...
www.myspace.com/laivina

anything from january 2006 and back...if you archive