[yasr_overall_rating]
As an investment banker struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash, his increasingly confessional series of letters to a vending machine company catch the attention of a customer service rep with whom he forms an unlikely connection.
Jake Gyllenhaal is an odd one. He seems to linger between the forefront and the shadows. Just before he becomes but a phantom in public consciousness, he jolts us with a performance, beaming his way back to the forefront. He is grossly underrated and I believe may suffer from a mild albeit a bizarre case of Backpfeifengesicht (a face badly in need of a fist) syndrome, where people don’t know why they cure up a seemingly illogical dislike of a person despite the person’s talents and generally affable nature. While I have somewhat severely digressed, my point is Jake Gyllenhaal always seems to surprise me or rather reminds me of his talent, and with director Jean-Marc Vallée’s and screenwriter Bryan Sipe’s “Demolition,” Gyllenhaal continues to do so.
Gyllenhaal is Davis Mitchell, a young investment banker who has been cascading through life oblivious until his wife, Julia (Heather Lind) is killed in a car accident, and Davis comes out of the accident alive with hardly a scratch. The dramatic side swipe sets the tone for the film and at first you aren’t sure if things are going down the maudlin road of disaster or about to turn left. Thankfully, it is the latter. While tears flow for Julia, Davis is dry. He even practices a grieve-face in private after his wife’s funeral, knowing his perceived numbness is unusual and perplexing to his in-laws, which is particularly tricky when his father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper) is also his boss. Their latent disdain for Davis bubbles up to the surface as they are bewildered by Davis’s erratic behavior.
Davis copes through his grief, through his awakening, by taking a metaphor to a literal level and physically deconstructing every inch of his life. Nothing is safe or sacred, strewn about is his computer, refrigerator, a restroom stall at work, and eventually demolished is his glass house and his wife’s marble top dresser decorated with her perfumes, oils, and jewelry. But before the demolition of his physical possessions, Davis begins his process via confession letter in the guise of a complaint to the vending company whose machine failed to deliver the Peanut M&Ms he paid for after hearing the news of his wife’s death. Intrigued by the honesty of his letters, a compassionate and curious Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts) contacts Davis at 2 A.M. and thus begins a strange platonic relationship between a pothead mother of a precocious teenage glam rock obsessed, Chris (Judah Lewis), and a man who may not have loved his wife.
“Demolition,” is pretty ridiculous, but I love it. While I can’t imagine sledgehammering my life to dust, I can empathize with feeling numb and feeling suffocated by possessions, questioning their purposes and my initial desires for them, and feeling cattle-prodded into the boxed in life of wealth gained and life events had. Sipe’s screenplay is riddled with cliché emotional triggers that could be pared down, but by the same token he does throw in some brutal humor that helps balance the clichéd aspects. The strength of “Demolition,” is the cast. Gyllenhaal is stellar, and while at times you wonder if he borders on the sociopathic, he looks his most normal, congenial even, compared to the extremes of his roles in “Nightcrawler” and “Southpaw.” Naomi Watts, Judah Lewis, and Chris Cooper are also exceptional. Jean-Marc Vallée has given us a film that has a touch of “cool” reminiscent of his previous film “C.R.A.Z.Y.” and a somewhat familiar yet haunting portrait of people unearthing their truest selves.
In theaters April 8th
