In Jean-Marc Vallee's new film Demolition,
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a guy drifting through life in the wake of tragedy. And
to break himself out of that funk, he uses a sledgehammer to literally smash
apart his old home. The image of a sledgehammer could also be used to describe
the way the film's themes are pounded into the audience with reckless abandon.
While there is much to admire about the performances from Gyllenhaal and the
rest of the talented cast, Demolition traffics in platitudes rather than
anything genuine far too often.
“Everything has become a metaphor,” says
investment banker Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) at one point in the film, and he
might as well have been talking to us. The screenplay by Bryan Sipe spoon feeds
the audience one tired trope after another in the most unsubtle of ways, and
it's only due to Gyllenhaal's typically staunch portrayal as a man trying to
put his life back together that the film doesn't become a complete joke.
Davis is a man whose wife (Heather Lind), a woman he barely seems to
acknowledge, has just been killed in a car accident. While the people around
him send their condolences and express their grief, Davis is completely devoid
of emotion. It's a wonder nobody suggested he might be a sociopath who murdered
her. But the fact is he's simply shut down on an emotional level and
always seems to have been, long before her death.
The first signs of interminable
offbeat-ness enter the picture when Davis tries to buy a pack of M&Ms
at the hospital where his wife died. The candy doesn't dispense, and Davis
begins writing long, detailed letters to the machine's customer service rep,
pothead single mom Karen (Naomi Watts), who is taken aback by his honesty. This
begins a friendship that goes beyond mere letter writing, as Davis becomes part
of Karen's life and into that of her adolescent son, Chris (Judah Lewis), who
is undergoing an identity crisis. Surmising that they are both pretty
"fucked up", Chris and Davis become fast friends, and some of the
film's most enjoyable scenes are them just hanging out, playing the drums,
rockin' out, smashing things with sledgehammers. Boys being boys, right?
The problem is that very little else
resonates or feels authentic. Why is Davis smashing up his house with a hammer?
He's fallen into a disturbing pattern of literally tearing things apart in
order to find out how they work. The obvious, heavy-handed metaphor is that
he's tearing apart his own life in order to find out what went wrong and if it
can be fixed. This rightfully perplexes the crap out of his stern father-in-law
(Chris Cooper) who can't understand why Davis isn't in mourning like everybody
else. Davis' odd behavior is leaned on as a substitute for real reflection;
little insight into what sent him into a tailspin is made available that isn't
already riddled in quirk. There's a scene where he literally runs through
a flock of seagulls; if SNL were spoofing overcooked Hollywood clichés that
would be in it. And there really isn't much in the way of dramatic tension.
What exactly are the stakes? Davis' sanity? With so little genuine conflict,
Sipe's screenplay shoehorns in a dangerous scenario that comes completely out
of left field and feels like it's from a separate movie altogether.
Despite all of this, Gyllenhaal proves to
be better than the material he's saddled with. Considering the problems with
the screenplay, he had an immensely difficult lift trying to make Davis' pain
believable, while also finding moments of black humor in his struggle. He
managed to pull it off, though, and the same goes for Watts in a sorely
underdeveloped role. In a way it's kind of amazing that Marc-Vallee, whose previous
films Dallas Buyers
Club and Wild showed such emotional nuance,
would sign up for such a forceful mess. If anything, it's Demolition that is sorely in need of being
taken apart and repaired.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
