Falling apart is the best way to get it together
|||DEMOLITION
DIRECTOR: Jean-Marc Vallée
CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Heather Lind, Polly Draper
CLASSIFICATION: 16 DL
RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (ouf or 5)
Ann Hornaday
Between Nightcrawler and Southpaw, Jake Gyllenhaal has been on something of a roll in recent years. Continuing the one-word-title lucky streak, the oddball grief drama Demolition proves that an actor who could easily be dismissed as just another watchable face is actually possessed of subtle, fascinatingly protean chops.
Gyllenhaal plays Davis Mitchell, a young investment banker who’s on the phone with his boss as Demolition opens. Filmed in a series of disorienting close-ups, the sequence reveals that Davis is in a car being driven by his wife, Julia (Lind), who’s wondering when he’s going to fix the fridge. A study in the exasperated minutiae of the reasonably happy marriage, the scene expertly ratchets up the tension, so that even its foregone conclusion arrives like a thuddingly paralysing blow.
What ensues is a sometimes bizarre, self-consciously quirky portrait of a man reconsidering his life’s purpose, the foundation of his marriage and his inescapable sense of alienation from a world he can only perceive through destructive, shattering metaphors. When a package of M&Ms gets stuck in a waiting room vending machine, Davis begins to write rambling letters to the company’s customer service department, using the lost $1.25 as a foil to address any number of unanswerable questions, from the precise nature of the grief he can’t express to unresolved issues with Julia.
The person reading those letters is a woman named Karen (Watts), who develops her own obsession with Davis. Demolition unfolds almost as an epistolary romance, although it’s no conventional love story, especially when Karen’s teenaged son, Chris (Judah Lewis), stomps into Davis’s sight-lines.
Directed by Vallée, this is a movie that seeks to defy most (but not all) Hollywood-sanctioned rules, taking its unsteady protagonist on an increasingly erratic journey involving dramatic detours and unsettling outbursts, culminating in an impressively staged episode when the title comes into floridly literal play.
Vallée knows how to keep the narrative moving at an intriguing clip, even when the story digresses into contrived territory; he has a vibrant visual style that makes equally attractive work of Davis’s collage of memories and the sterile box he calls home. Eventually, though, Demolition winds up kowtowing to the exact kind of sentiment that Davis has spent the entire movie idiosyncratically avoiding. Gyllenhaal might be convincing as a man in the manic throes of guilt, regret and emotional isolation he can barely register. But the story strands his character in another limbo state, albeit with slightly more optimistic prospects. Gyllenhaal’s admirably nimble performance deserved more. – The Washington Post
If you liked Dragonfly or Return to Me, you will like this.