“If I Stay” sounds like a wonderful movie on paper. The gist is that high school student Mia Hall (Chloe Grace Moretz) faces an earth-shattering decision after a car accident kills her parents and younger brother. Should she fight to live or give up and succumb to death?
As promising as the premise is, however, the execution is disappointing. Director R.J. Cutler suffocates the audience with almost two hours of Mia and her irritating boyfriend, Adam (Jamie Blackley).
First of all, the pair exhibits some signs of an unhealthy relationship. Whenever Mia brings up her application to Juilliard, her dream school, he yells at her for bailing out on him. Really, he’s the one leaving town constantly for various gigs. She only cancels one of their dates once, for a prestigious audition in San Francisco. If he really cared about her, he would not interfere with her pursuit of her goals.
Even if they do care for each other, it’s clear their love is not good for either of them. Adam introduces Mia to alcohol, and they blow off other commitments to spend time together. Also, they constantly break up and get back together without addressing what caused them to split in the first place — their divergent lifestyles and goals.
Cutler’s greatest failure, though, isn’t his focus on Mia and Adam’s relationship. It’s his inability to carry over the best moments from author Gayle Forman’s version of “If I Stay” to the big screen. Forman’s novel was a hit precisely because it did a superior job at describing Mia’s internal struggle.
In the book, her choice to live provides encouragement and support to people contemplating self-harm or suicide. Mia’s conclusion is unabashedly a positive one: She thinks, “We manage to survive loss because [of] love: It never dies, it never goes away, it never fades.”
In the novel, Mia’s epiphany is one of the last paragraphs in the book, and emphasizes that she is choosing to live because she wants to stay and love her grandparents, friends and, yes, Adam. It highlights that life is inherently precious and worth living. In the film, by contrast, Mia makes her decision when Adam comes to see her for the first time.
This suggests that Adam is paramount in her life. Not her best friend, who’s been there for her since they were children. Not her grandmother or grandfather. Nope. It’s Adam. Thus, Cutler conveys the importance of only romantic love, and an unstable one at that. Although Adam promises to give up his music career and “let” Mia go to Juilliard, he has done so in the past and not followed through.
I’d like to extend a closing thank you to R.J. Cutler for tarnishing Forman’s “If I Stay.” Thanks to movie-Mia’s example, I know that dream colleges are nothing next to having a (not-even-that-hot) boyfriend.
