2014年09月04日——New Yorker——Young Love.doc

Young Love “If I Stay” and “The Last of Robin Hood.” BY?ANTHONY LANE ? ? ? TABLE OF CONTENTS?? Chlo? Grace Moretz and Jamie Blackley star in R. J. Cutler’s new movie.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL GILLETTE Young-adult fiction: what a peculiar product it is, sold and consumed as avidly as the misery memoir and the self-help book, and borrowing sneakily from both. One can see the gap in the market. What are literate kids meant to do with themselves, or with their itchy brains, as they wander the no man’s land between Narnia and Philip Roth? The ideal protagonist of the genre is at once victimized and possessed of decisive power—someone like Mia, the heroine of Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which has clung grimly to the?Times?best-seller list, on and off, for twenty weeks. And the ideal subject is death, or, as we should probably call it, the big sleepover. Movie studios, exquisitely tuned to the economics of the sniffle, are on the case. “The Fault in Our Stars,” adapted from John Green’s book and starring Shailene Woodley as a cancer patient, is still in cinemas, and its global box-office takings—two hundred and eighty million dollars to date—are in the pink of health. Now, in its wake, comes the film of “If I Stay,” written by Shauna Cross and directed by R. J. Cutler, barely giving teen-age weepers a chance to throw their tissues on the floor and grab a fresh box of Goobers. Even if they haven’t read the novel, they will know the mortal twist, thanks to the trailer, and to the fact that no twist can survive the blizzard of life online. Early on, there is a car crash on a wintry road, involving Mia (Chlo? Grace Moretz); her father, Denny (Joshua Leonard); her mother, Kat (Mireille Enos); and her younger brother, Teddy (Jakob Davies). Mia spends the rest of the movie hovering on the border between this world and the next, watching her wounded body being taken from the wreck to the hospital, and reflecting in voice-over on her existence hitherto. She is, at best, a demi-