Jean-Marc Vallée (2015)
Demolition is as good as its word but isn’t the orgy of destruction some filmgoers may have hoped for. Word of mouth about that could partly explain the movie’s modest box-office performance but there are better reasons for giving it a miss. The start is promising. Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in a car with his wife Julia (Heather Lind). She’s driving; he’s in the passenger seat, looking at his mobile phone. The couple are discussing domestic matters, with a mixture of irritation and humour, when another vehicle smacks into the driver’s side of the car. We next see Davis, who is physically unscathed in the accident, sitting in a hospital waiting area. His father-in-law Phil (Chris Cooper) approaches and tearfully tells Davis that Julia is dead. A numbed Davis puts money in a vending machine and gets nothing out. When he raises the matter with a receptionist, the latter barely looks up to explain that it’s the company responsible for the machine with whom Davis will have to take this up. This is just what he does, and in a big way. Davis starts to write a letter of complaint but feels compelled to supply full context – not just the adding-insult-to-injury matter of failing to get a snack you’ve paid for just after learning that you’ve lost your wife, but plenty more detail about his life and his work too. The vending machine company is informed that Davis is an investment banker in Manhattan (he’s employed by the firm of which his father-in-law is a founding partner), that he and Julia had no children, and so on.
These early scenes are well written and acted. They have a wry quality that draws you in. The expansive letter of complaint is an economical, eccentric way of imparting background information. But that missive is also the first in a series – with Davis expressing more and more of his personal feelings in the ones that follow – and a turning point in Demolition. The communications make clear Davis’s tendency to tell people things they don’t need to know. They foreshadow the whimsical but leaden existential payload that Jean-Marc Vallée and the screenwriter Bryan Sipe will drop on the audience over the next ninety minutes. The writerly characteristics of Davis and Sipe converge in the moment, about halfway through proceedings, when Davis’s voiceover announces that ‘Everything has become a metaphor’. (This redundant tip to the viewer has, unsurprisingly, been singled out for derision in several reviews of the film.) Davis’s struggle to make sense of what’s happened is reflected in the habit he develops of taking electrical appliances to bits. His growing sense that his former life has been destroyed and/or was a sham brings out the demolition man in him: he trashes the fittings and fixtures of the sleek, spacious, soulless house that he and Julia lived in. That ‘and/or’ is a signal not of interesting ambiguity in the script but of sloppiness.
It’s often hard to sort out what Davis is imagining from what’s really happening to him. Demolition seems to operate on the premise that grief and bereavement stir up such turbulence in people’s thoughts and feelings that the succession of improbable things on the screen will make a kind of emotional sense. Davis’s letters to the vending machine company are received and responded to by its one-person complaints unit, a woman called Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts), who, outside work, is struggling to get her own life in order. On a commuter train Davis notices a woman passenger and intuits that she’s the customer services person he’s been in contact with. Which she is. The coincidence seemed so improbable I assumed at first this precognition was happening only inside Davis’s head but it provides the bridge to the relationship with single-mother Karen that he actually develops, including visits to her home and bonding with her sexually confused early teenage son (Judah Lewis). Davis wanders round a deserted Coney Island and pays particular attention to a disused carousel. While Julia’s parents commemorate their daughter through a scholarships scheme for aspiring investment bankers, Davis eventually decides on a different memorial: he gets the carousel running again. In one of the last sequences of the film, we see Phil and his wife (Polly Draper) among the kids on the merry-go-round, astride their horses and smiling at their son-in-law. By this stage in the story, Davis seems both to have disgraced himself irredeemably in Phil’s eyes and to have discovered his marriage to Julia really was a sham. The concluding carousel sequence therefore has an authentic dream-of-contrary quality but I think it’s meant to be a matter of fact. The survivors have come through: like the fairground ride rescued from desuetude, they’ve taken on a new lease of life.
Even when something crops up that has to be a fantasy – as when doctors discover that a part of Davis’s heart is missing – it’s metaphorically instructive in the same, silly way the film’s reality is. At the end of Demolition it’s wholly unclear how Davis feels about what’s happened, what he’s found out and what can be done to redress (or ignore) these things. Bad as it is, the movie would be a good deal worse if Jake Gyllenhaal weren’t playing the lead. He’s excellent in the first scenes and has a startling moment at Julia’s funeral. Davis leaves the gathering for a few moments to be alone. He goes to the bathroom and, as he looks in the mirror, his face crumples. Someone else comes in and he stops sobbing instantly. This isn’t an exercise of self-control: Davis was just practising doing grief-stricken. The plot depends on the protagonist’s complete and improbable isolation – there’s no sign of his having any friends until his platonic relationship with Karen gets underway. Davis is also the latest movie hero to be governed by the dubious cliché that going loco is a kind of liberation, the result of ‘seeing through’ the conventions and façades on which normal life depends. At least Jake Gyllenhaal makes Davis’s physically extrovert behaviour – whether taking a hammer to his home or generally goofing around – reasonably entertaining. Naomi Watts is conscientious as Karen although you feel she should be getting better roles than this – ditto the expert Chris Cooper, who’s wasted as the censorious father-in-law. As Karen’s son, Judah Lewis brings to mind the androgynous child played by the eleven-year-old Jodie Foster in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More.
9 May 2016