Jake Gyllenhaal is a master at doing crazy (as
in Nightcrawler and Prisoners), and so in Demolition as Davis, a man who is not
equipped to deal with the death of his wife, he achieves another stunning
performance. Demolition is a psychological study of the grieving process in
someone who is alienated from his emotions and therefore lacking empathy for
others’ feelings.
When his wife Julia (Lind) dies in a car accident
(she, driving and he, a passenger), Davis exhibits little outward emotion,
although we can imagine he is hurting inside when we’re shown his associations
and memories of her. Although he’s
not particularly close to his father-in-law (Cooper), they work together, and
Davis remembers an observation Phil made at one time. It had to do with healing the heart, and how one must take
it all apart and put it back together in order to heal.
Davis takes this literally as well as
metaphorically, and begins to do just that, first with the refrigerator his
wife had told him was leaking in their last conversation, and gradually the
urge to demolish more and more things increases. He is rather compulsive, so is always interested in doing a
thorough job.
This quality surfaces immediately at the
hospital in the intensive care unit, where he tries to buy some M&Ms from a
vending machine, but the package gets stuck on the way down. He takes a picture of the machine
number, and proceeds to write the company for a refund. But he doesn’t stick to the matter at
hand, he writes his life history in letter after letter. Of course, this comes to the attention
of the Customer Care service woman, Karen (Watts). She herself is rather kooky, and her son Chris (Lewis) is an
astute, lonely kid.
The connection made between Davis and Karen is
one that makes you think of the belief that things happen for a reason or that
people become attracted to one another to fill unconscious needs. At any rate, even though they appear
not to have much in common at all, they strike up a friendship, which means
that Davis and Chris spend a fair amount of time together. Interestingly, regressive experiences
back to childhood link Davis and Karen together, and allows Davis to provide
the kind of male understanding that Chris needs—not that everything that
happens is sensible, but it does seem to be therapeutic.
Director Jean-Marc Vallee has previously
demonstrated his keen understanding of human psychological make-up and
development in Wild and Dallas Buyers Club; and in Demolition with the writer Bryan Sipe,
he shows how creative people are in getting their needs met and doing what they
need to do to heal. This is
sometimes a painstaking process and not always one that makes conventional
sense. One of the many things I
like about his work is how true to life it is, and how it demonstrates
surprisingly effective ways in which we heal ourselves. Humanity always reigns supreme in his
work.
I’ve mentioned how Gyllenhaal absolutely knew,
understood, and portrayed the character of Davis, and Naomi Watts and Chris
Cooper are right on target with their roles. Watts is a natural for females who seem neurotic, but are
actually stalwart (Birdman). Cooper is versatile in a variety of
roles he has played in American Beauty,
Adaptaion, Lone Star, August:
Osage County, and Breach;
here, he combines an aggressive Wall Street trader and a tender-hearted
father. The young actor Lewis
captures the persona of a troubled teenager who is desperately looking for
assistance in constructing his identity.
Guidance in the form of deconstruction
(demolition) comes from an unlikely source, that of the troubled Davis.
Demolition, a film
for the psychologically minded.
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