Demolition – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis

Jake Gyllenhaal, perennially touted as a star in the ascendant, has cut an increasingly strange figure over the past few years.  With Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition, he continues his habit (see also 2014’s Nightcrawler and 2015’s Southpaw) of giving overcommitted performances in films that offer only the merest wisp of pretext for their existence, beyond their star’s so-far-thwarted efforts to swell his awards cabinet.  If Gyllenhaal’s choices lately suggest a desire to channel the adult-oriented entertainments of the 1970s, then the films themselves fall down because the sheer over-investment of his performances shows up the flimsiness of their surroundings – Nightcrawler’s tiresomely blunt media satire and Southpaw’s paint-by-numbers boxing saga registering as dim echoes of Network and Rocky (both 1976).

This time, we are at least spared an attention-grabbing physical transformation, as Demolition reveals itself to be one of those bourgeois rebellion thingumabobs that might have seemed daring in the Summer of Love.  The story involves newly-widowed Wall Street investment broker Davis Mitchell (that’s Gyllenhaal), and the various people who, inadvertently or otherwise, nudge him along the road to self-realisation (that’s everybody else).  The initial conceit is fairly witty, as Davis’s disturbance leads him to write increasingly confessional letters of complaint to a vending company and, in turn, to befriend company employee Karen (Naomi Watts) and her confused son Chris (Judah Lewis).  Watts is here channelling the same downtrodden decency she mined in Laurie Collyer’s little-seen Sunlight, Jr. (2013), and she’s very good at it.  More’s the pity, then, that her character is essentially a prop – although she isn’t quite as ludicrously underserved by Demolition as she is by Gus Van Sant’s imminent The Sea of Trees.

The film’s ultimate focus is, of course, on the bond that develops between Davis and Chris, although it mercifully sidesteps some of the standard surrogate-father clichés, and tries to add a further wrinkle by vaguely gesturing in the direction of Chris’s sexual confusion, before shrugging and looking elsewhere.  Out of Davis and Chris’s heart-to-hearts emerges the central metaphor of the film, which is that – oh yes! – it’s sometimes necessary to take something apart in order to put it back together again.  What this actually amounts to is an interminable set-piece of Gyllenhaal smashing expensive home appliances and designer attire – a sequence that is presumably intended to symbolise the cathartic resolution of Gyllenhaal’s malaise, but which seems more like the galling sanctimony of a monied malcontent who has to own everything before deciding that none of it was worth having in the first place.  As wisdom for the ages goes, it’s not going to trouble Confucius.

After Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Wild (2014) and now this, Vallée is carving out a singular – if not exactly interesting – niche as a filmmaker who splits the difference between glossy melodrama, cod-grit, and motivational speaking.  Although Demolition exists purely to showcase its lead, there’s something commendable to Vallée’s wrong-headed determination that it double as a formal adventure.  Throughout, the cutting and music-cues are unfailingly energetic, often pushing the obvious to such a degree of overstatement that it appears weirdly rejuvenated.  The effect across 100 minutes is rather exhausting, though.  By the time the cutesy conclusion rolled around, this reviewer was wishing somebody would just give Gyllenhaal an Oscar so the rest of us can get on with our lives in peace.  Although on this evidence, he might not find true peace until he smashes his statuette in slow-motion before gazing soulfully at a sunset.