If I Stay
Director: R.J. Cutler
Writer: Shauna Cross
Based on: Gayle Forman‘s novel
Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Jamie Blackley, Mireille Enos, Joshua Leonard, Liana Liberato, Stacy Keach, Gabrielle Rose, Jakob Davies, Ali Milner, Aisha Hinds

Plot:
Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz) is waiting for her college acceptance letter. Quite anxiously. Her family (Mireille Enos, Joshua Leonard, Jakob Davies) try to get her mind of it by taking her to her grandparents’ place. But on the way there, they all have an accident and Mia finds herself floating outside of her body, seeing her parents die and her brother barely alive either. Soon she realizes that she has to decide: does she want to stay alive, where things are complicated – especially with her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley) and the loss of her family – or does she want to let go?

If you’re not careful, If I Stay will land you in a diabetic coma. It pulls on all the heartstring with full force and is equally effective and ridiculous with it.

[SPOILERS]

With the exception of torture, If I Stay really employs every method known to humankind to make somebody cry and they are quite good at it as well. It’s probably gonna be hard to resist that supreme manipulation – I was unable to. But as tears were streaming down my face, I kept cursing the film in my mind because it was just so obvious and clichéd with its manipulation.

And not only that, I did have some issues with it. I pretty much hated the message that dying was your choice and if you fight hard enough, you don’t have to die before it’s your time – since that implies that all those people who die at a young age from horrible illnesses or whatever just didn’t try hard enough to stay alive. [It also implies the same thing about Mia’s parents and her brother, btw.] I am also taken aback by the assumption that dying/suicide is “the easy way out”. It really isn’t.

I get the importance of young love and all, but you have Mia’s grandparents, her aunts, her best friend – everybody crying for her, about her, over her… And the only one who really gets through, the only one who can pull her back is her boyfriend. And I just don’t think that romantic love trumps everything else. I don’t like that it’s always played as the be-all and end-all of all kinds of loves, the superior form that is so much better than any other kind of love.

But if we disregard those things (if the film had just left out the entire death-thing), If I Stay tells a cute love story with a good cast and a nice sense of humor. It’s full of kitsch but kitsch can be quite nice, even when it is often ridiculous – as it is here.

Summarizing: a tear-jerker par excellence. If you’re in the mood for that, go for it.