Demo­li­tion – first look review

Jake Gyl­len­haal trades his shark-skin suit and a strict régime of below-the-chin hair removal for tan Cater­pil­lars, car­go pants and a sledge-ham­mer in Jean-Marc Vallée’s delight­ful­ly (point­ed­ly) ram­shackle exam­i­na­tion of grief’s crooked shad­ow, Demo­li­tion. As bad as this sounds, think Peter Weir’s Fear­less meets a PG-13 Fight Club (with Falling Down trim­mings), and aimed at peo­ple who attend poet­ry read­ings – in a good way!

Fol­low­ing the sud­den death of his wife (Heather Lind) in a traf­fic acci­dent (at which he was present but left mys­te­ri­ous­ly unscarred), Gyllenhaal’s steely hedge fund jack­al Davis Mitchell takes his good sweet time to locate the cor­rect out­let to express exact­ly what he’s feel­ing. His father-in-law/­boss (Chris Coop­er) does not take kind­ly to this wacky tran­si­tion, so he’s allowed some time off for self-repair.

On the back of an inad­e­quate vend­ing expe­ri­ence at the inten­sive care unit where his wife passed, Davis strikes up a strange, con­fes­sion­al postal cor­re­spon­dence with the cannabis-smok­ing cus­tomer ser­vice man­ag­er of the com­pa­ny, Karen (Nao­mi Watts), and embeds him­self with­in her fam­i­ly while he sets out on a course of destruc­tion ther­a­py. His days are duly con­sumed with smash­ing hous­es and dis­man­tling appli­ances. He also offers some top cool tips to Karen’s gen­der-bend­ing, pot­ty-mouthed son.

Demo­li­tion works as a fine com­pan­ion piece to Vallée’s under­rat­ed Wild, anoth­er study of how eccen­tric, immov­able per­son­al goals can be employed as an appa­ra­tus to tran­scend depres­sion or self-immo­la­tion. Instead of wal­low­ing in histri­on­ic emo­tion, the film employs lev­i­ty and humour to dis­arm­ing effect. Yes, this is essen­tial­ly the sto­ry of ​“what’s going to both­er Jake’s bone-dry tear ducts in the final scene?” but that ​“jour­ney” is sat­is­fy­ing­ly devoid of sim­plis­tic life lessons and Lit­tle Book of Grief apho­risms. There’s a messi­ness to the film which coa­lesces with its char­ac­ters respons­es to sur­round­ings and people.

Gyl­len­haal – not the most earnest­ly emo­tion­al of actors – has found a per­fect role in dead-eyed Davis Mitchell, a hol­low shell of degrad­ed human­i­ty who embraces his inner punk while hid­ing behind a cham­pi­onship-lev­el pok­er face. Though his new­ly found truth-teller schtick gar­ners a decent quo­ta of laughs, it masks the deep­er issue about what he actu­al felt about his wife, and whether her death is at all prob­lem­at­ic for him. It unlocks him from the pained rigours of his desk job, but the inter­est­ing ques­tion the film asks is whether death can evoke a skewed sense of hap­pi­ness and free­dom, though still with­in a frame­work of empathy.

The film’s loose struc­ture allows Val­lée to make it feel like a nar­ra­tive patch­work, with tiny asides sewn in between the larg­er blocks of nar­ra­tive. If the film has a fault it’s that it’s far too glibly judg­men­tal about 1 per cen­ters, and while that might work for some as sat­is­fy­ing, class-bait­ing grist to the mill, it’s so open and care­ful with its char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions else­where, that it means that that Davis doesn’t real­ly have any­one sub­stan­tial to bounce off of.