Aiden Quinn, Taylor Schilling
“STAY” My rating: C+ (OpeningMarch 21 at the Glenwood South)
99 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Stay” is a well-acted, minor-key Irish love story that is probably too minor-key for its own good.
Dermot (Aidan Quinn) is a sixtysomething retired history professor now living in a small burg on the coast near Galway, Ireland. As “Stay” begins, he’s happily cohabiting with Abby (Taylor Schilling, star of Showtime’s prison dramedy “Orange Is the New Black”), a woman half his age.
All seems blissful until Abby realizes she’s preggers. Dermot has never hidden his antipathy toward fatherhood and Abby’s condition aggravates whatever cracks are in their relationship.
She heads back home to Montreal and her blue-collar father (Michael Ironside) to decide whether to have an abortion or go through with the pregnancy.
Back in Ireland Dermot drinks, baits the developer who’s trying to turn the adjacent property into a housing development, and gets involved in a dig for a bog person — a prehistoric individual whose body has been preserved by the peat beneath Dermot’s feet.
Writer/director Wiebke von Carolsfeld (“Marion Bridge”) is all about mood and quiet observation — too moody and too quiet for my taste. Though her visual sense is expansive (the film is filled with lovely wide-screen compositions of the local countryside), she takes a detached view of her characters’ travails, and despite solid perfs from Quinn and Schilling, we’re always on the outside looking in.
It would help if von Carolsfeld were a bit more generous with the humor inherent in the setting. This is rural Ireland, after all, a place crawling with eccentricities. How come everybody’s so borderline bland?
“Stay’s” heart is in the right place. Now if it could only find its funnybone.
| Robert W. Butler
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