Stay: Ewan Mcgregor and Ryan Gosling Essay

Submitted By kaileec05
Words: 887
Pages: 4

Stay The visual strategy in Marc Forster’s Stay is so indirect that not everyone will see what it happening, but it provides a clue to the movies secret. In Stay, the major things that are happening are it involves the transitions from scene to scene, the colors and noises, and the different things going on throughout the movie. The moral of this storyline is that when something is starting to come to an end, you want nothing more than to hold on to it more. Sam Foster played by Ewan McGregor is a psychiatrist living in New York City with his girlfriend, Lila Culpepper played by Naomi Watts, who was once one of his patients. However, it's another one of his patients who becomes the focus of his obsessions when Henry Letham played by Ryan Gosling, a disturbed young man whom Foster took over from a colleague, announces during a session that he intends to commit suicide in three days, on his 21st birthday. Sam takes the threat quite seriously and tries to track down Henry, who seems to have disappeared. Sam speaks to a number of Henry's friends and acquaintances; his mother, the man he claimed was his father, Dr. Leon Patterson, a waitress who regularly served Henry, and his former therapist, Dr. Beth Levy. As Sam talks to people in Henry's life, he finds he's learning more about himself than the man he's supposed to save, and he begins to drift into an emotional state where the supposedly dead and the living cross paths. Throughout the movie "Stay," the visuals are important to the movie's point of view and ultimately to its meaning. Throughout the movie, some scenes involve transitions from one shot to the next, some delicate, some bold, all of them so alert we’re not always sure what we just saw. For example, in the beginning of the movie, we see Ryan Gosling sitting on the ground in front of a burning car on the Brooklyn Bridge. The camera circles around him a few times and Gosling gets up to walk away and then all of a sudden the scene has changed to a different man’s face getting up out of bed. Towards the end of the movie when strange things keep happening to Sam, the director wants the audience to start to understand what is really happening. When Gosling and McGregor are talking, you notice that their voices are switching. This is because the director is trying to show the audience that McGregor is actually Gosling throughout this whole vision while Gosling is dying from a car accident. The transitions through the movie are very different from many other movies, but that is one way to tell that the movie is based on Goslings memories before he dies. Another big that happens a lot throughout the movie, is the different colors and noises. One big thing is that McGregor is wearing yellow pants in the whole movie. They say that things happen for a reason, and the reason that McGregor is wearing yellow pants is because it represents the colors from the car lights while Gosling is dying on the bridge. During the day, you don’t realize but people hear a lot of things that sometimes they don’t even realize are happening. In the movie McGregor says to his girlfriend that he