Demo­li­tion

Invest­ment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyl­len­haal) is dri­ving along with his wife, Julia (Heather Lind). They’re in the midst a mun­dane con­ver­sa­tion about home appli­ances. All of a sud­den a car crash­es into them, killing Julia. The cred­its fol­low, and the word ​‘Demo­li­tion’ appears on screen. It’s a shock­ing ges­ture: we’re intro­duced to a char­ac­ter, then they’re instant­ly killed.

The scene finds its prece­dent in some of the direc­tor Jean-Marc Vallée’s oth­er open­ings: a dropped child in 2005’s C.R.A.Z.Y.; AIDS activist Ron Woodroof faint­ing in 2013’s Dal­las Buy­ers Club; and Cheryl Strayed rip­ping off her toe­nail in 2014’s Wild. Vallée’s cin­e­ma usu­al­ly begins with trau­ma. But what’s dif­fer­ent in Demo­li­tion is that the vio­lence doesn’t direct­ly affect the hero.

Based on a script by Bryan Sipe, Vallée choos­es to film the crash from inside the car, dev­as­tat­ing Davis and the audi­ence, and then smooth­ly tran­si­tion­ing to the title. It should be abject: trans­form­ing the loss of a human life into an audi­ence shock. But this cyn­i­cal jibe would come to par­al­lel Davis’ own char­ac­ter arc through­out the film as he slow­ly learns to feel again.

After the death of his wife, every­one sur­round­ing him, espe­cial­ly his father-in-law Phil (Chris Coop­er), is strick­en by grief, while Davis con­tin­ues going to work as if noth­ing has even hap­pened. Davis tries to jus­ti­fy his behav­iour in a long-wind­ed let­ter to a vend­ing machine cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Karen (Nao­mi Watts), who becomes sym­pa­thet­ic to his plight. All the while Davis starts act­ing bizarrely at work, alien­at­ing him­self from his peers and extend­ed fam­i­ly by choos­ing to demol­ish his home and every­thing that reminds him of Julia.

Davis’ process of self-real­i­sa­tion inevitably takes him to some dark places. He slow­ly starts to evolve, and through open­ing him­self up to the emo­tion­al pain of oth­ers, he is able to rebuild his frac­tured life. Vallée, with his reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Yves Bélanger, cap­tures the move­ment of the actors and land­scapes with a musi­cal rhythm, which dove­tails nice­ly with a jam ses­sion between Karen’s son Chris and Davis that spreads wide across the city. Com­pared to his oth­er work, Demo­li­tion is edit­ed with a lot more snap and style. The sub­ject mat­ter could be seen as deeply maudlin, and so this spright­ly, viva­cious for­mal treat­ment reflects Davis’ own uncon­ven­tion­al reac­tion to his situation.

Dur­ing this peri­od of intense focus on dis­man­tling and restor­ing phys­i­cal objects, Davis hap­pens across a decom­mis­sioned carousel while wan­der­ing along the New York water­front. His reha­bil­i­ta­tion is capped off with a cli­mac­tic scene of unbri­dled hap­pi­ness as this dusty car­ni­val rel­ic is brought back from the dol­drums. After so much mis­ery, the film assures us that a bea­con of light can always be found when the world appears to be turn­ing to rubble.

With TV ser­i­al Big Lit­tle Lies com­ing up and after that a poten­tial Janis Joplin biopic in the off­ing, Vallée proves he is com­mit­ted to a heart­felt and per­son­al pop­u­lar cin­e­ma that speaks to the con­tem­po­rary times. If he choos­es to remain a more anony­mous and mod­est pub­lic fig­ure, then so be it.