Another lonely eccentric played to perfection by Jake Gyllenhaal.
Demolition
Grade: A-
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club)
Screenplay: Bryan Sipe (The Choice)
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (Night Crawler), Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 41 min
by John DeSando
“One moment the house had stood there with such dignity between the bomb sites like a man in a top hat, and then, bang, crash, there wasn’t anything left—not anything.” Graham Greene, The Destructors
Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) has a tough time in Demolition expressing his feelings. As a guy who also holds his emotions close to himself, I fully understand what this eccentric character is going through after his wife Julia’s (Heather Lind) death in an accident. The film, billed as a comedy, is an odd depiction of an introvert working his way through his grief by destroying things, a fetish he seems to have just acquired but an apparent salve for his dull affect.
Evidencing the same notion highlighted above in Graham Greene’s short story, this film shows that in destroying, Davis is actually creating. Out of the rubble of houses he has helped raze, he begins the recovery that will make him see he can love and rebuild.
By contacting a vending machine customer relations rep, Karen (Naomi Watts), Davis ingeniously can complain about the machine at work but also unload several letters about his anxious life: “I think you deserve the whole story,” he writes and proceeds to do just that. That they form a platonic relationship is a positive turn on the meeting cute and having sex motif.
His sympathy for Karen’s gay son, Chris (Judah Lewis—newcomer on his way fast to stardom), is one of the few ways Davis is able to show us he is a character worth caring about because he can care for others.
Director Jean-Marc Vallee, no stranger to depicting lonely men on the mend, and writer Bryan Sipe don’t dwell on the maudlin or the tears, even when Davis tries them a few times. No, they are interested in a character whose arc slowly changes for the better, albeit not quickly and not powerfully. I hope Gyllenhaal gets an Oscar nod for this brilliant role, as he did for the SAG nomination for Nightcrawler; this time he just may win playing a loser.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
