Demolition
Go! An unconventional portrait of grief.
Young widower's self-destructive grieving process
From Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée, Demolition is a story about the tumultuous and varied consequences of grief, as seen through the eyes of investment banker, Davis Mitchell (Jake Gylenhaall, Southpaw). Following the death of his wife in a car accident, we join him as he plunges into a deep pool of emotional confusion. When he initially hits the water, his reaction is cold - he returns to work and carries on as normal, much to the surprise of surly boss and father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper, The Bourne Identity). The only initial sign of his grief comes in a new-found sense of bare-faced honesty, manifesting in a series of over-informative and expressive complaint letters written to a vending machine company. Touched by his messages, customer services manager Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts, Birdman) personally reaches out to Davis. As he gets to know her, as well as her son Chris (Judah Lewis, Point Break (2015)), the impact of his loss evolves into eccentric expressions outside of social convention and the physical and emotional “demolition” of his past in order to understand and reconstruct his broken life.
Remaining gently comic throughout its hour and forty minutes, it avoids a strictly linear story in favour of a dance among Davis’ thoughts: short flashbacks to his past spliced with their relevance to his present, interrupted by longer scenes that play out his increasingly extraordinary behaviour. Everything Davis does is deliberately analogous with the emotions of grieving, confirmed by his early musing that since his wife’s death, “everything has become a metaphor”. This perhaps makes it a little too self-conscious and obvious at times, but Vallée's scattered-memories-approach with more than a whiff of Frenchy romanticism in its nostrils provides just about enough regular distraction to keep it from becoming tiresome. The flip-side is that by dipping in-and-out of a dream-like state, it stays less accessible and impactful than it might otherwise have been. A viewer who has experienced a similar, significant bereavement may see personal parallels that make this film as profound as it purports to be. Others may find it restricted to a quirky and occasionally intriguing film that raises a few questions about the meaning of modern life and debunks the theory that investment bankers are all numb, soulless, empty shells.
In spite of their characters' relationship that fails to really go anywhere, Gyllenhaal and Watts both give committed performances (as much in their portrayal of mild madness as in their acting), but it is the precocious Lewis that delivers the film’s best moments as a sensitive, bi-curious, rebellious early-teen. It is a shame his story doesn’t get more focus, particularly given an ending that is a touch unsatisfying. Either way, through its patchiness, there is an enjoyable Garden State-ist air to Demolition, which makes for a heartfelt film with enough purpose to make it worthwhile.
So go. Exploring grief is a complex endeavour and Demolition is a noble and unconventional attempt to do so. It asks enough broad "meaning of life" questions, but it is likely to be particularly relevant to people with philosophical personalities who have prematurely lost a loved one.
So go. Exploring grief is a complex endeavour and Demolition is a noble and unconventional attempt to do so. It asks enough broad "meaning of life" questions, but it is likely to be particularly relevant to people with philosophical personalities who have prematurely lost a loved one.
#demolitionmovie #demolition #cinema #moviereview #filmreview #movies #films #godontgo