APRIL 8, 2016
If given the offer of seeing a bearded Jake Gyllenhaal smash a lot of stuff with a sledge hammer, I’d respond, “Where do I sign up?”
Be careful what you sign up for.
“Demolition” is about grief, or more precisely, how one man deals with his grief. Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) has a cushy job as an investment banker so you know from the get-go that he has trouble expressing emotion. That resolve is put to the test when Davis’ wife is killed in a broadside auto accident. He is given the news that his wife has died by his father-in-law and boss Phil (Chris Cooper), who is overcome with grief, but Davis is far more obsessed with the fact that the hospital vending machine won’t give him his peanut M&Ms.
The screenplay by Bryan Sipe is not the most subtle that you’ve ever heard — at one point he even has Davis say out loud that everything that he’s seen after his wife’s death feels like a metaphor to him. Oh-oh, metaphor alert! Add to that Phil saying that if you want to fix something, “you have to take everything apart,” so we soon cut to Davis dismantling his leaky refrigerator at home, pulling to pieces his office computer and completely dismantling his in-laws’ bathroom lights. It’s only a matter of time before the chainsaws and the bulldozers show up. OK, we got it.
Now back to the peanut M&Ms. (You didn’t think I’d forget those, did you?) Davis begins to channel his grief through lengthy complaint letters to the customer service office of the vending machine company. One night, customer service rep Karen (Naomi Watts) responds, touched by his expressions of sadness about his wife. The two begin to correspond, which soon results in Davis semi-stalking her. His presence in her house initially bothers Karen’s 12-year-old son, Chris (Judah Lewis), an aspiring rocker who is uncertain about his sexuality, but man and boy soon bond as Davis asks the pre-teen to join him in taking a sledge hammer to his own glass house. (At least no one throws stones at it.)
“Demolition” was directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, a heavy-handed director who has inexplicably guided actors to Oscar wins (Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in “Dallas Buyers Club”) and nominations (Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in “Wild”). He may think he’ll do the same for Jake here, but I doubt it. Time after time, when Sipe’s script makes a metaphorical point, Vallée’s visuals will bold it, underline it and put it in ALL-CAPS. The effect is wearying.
This is no knock on the performances. You can see Gyllenhaal struggling to make something out of this character, and more often than not, he succeeds in spite of the material he’s handed. Watts continues to make interesting acting choices, and when she virtually disappears in the film’s third act, the movie suffers because of it. Cooper serves up yet another corporate tycoon — please give this great actor better parts! — but young Lewis, an actor who’s new to me, captures all the complexities of the enormously conflicted Chris and walks away with most of his scenes.
There have been quite a number of great films in the past centered on loss and grief, and I have to gave Sipe originality points for expressing those emotions through bulldozers. But when there’s a sledge hammer both in front of and behind the camera, that’s a problem that “Demolition” never manages to solve.
GRADE: C-
