Demolition (2015) [Blu-ray]
Drama

Tagline: LIFE: Some Disassembly Required.

A successful investment banker struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash. With the help of a customer service rep and her young son, he starts to rebuild, beginning with the demolition of the life he once knew.

Storyline: Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal), a successful investment banker, struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash. Despite pressure from his father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper), to pull it together, Davis continues to unravel. What starts as a complaint letter to a vending machine company turns into a series of letters revealing startling personal admissions. Davis' letters catch the attention of customer service rep, Karen (Naomi Watts), and, amidst emotional and financial burdens of her own, the two form an unlikely connection. With the help of Karen and her son Chris (Judah Lewis), Davis starts to rebuild, beginning with the demolition of the life he once knew. Written by Fox Searchlight

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Stephen Holden on April on 7, 2016 -- In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal diligently applies himself to playing a painfully familiar type in American movies that imagine having Something to Say: the Man Who Cannot Feel. His character, Davis Mitchell, is a Wall Street investment banker whose comfortably numb existence is jolted at the start of the film when his wife, Julia, dies in a car crash that leaves him physically and emotionally unscathed. In the weeks after the tragedy, Davis returns to work and acts as though nothing has happened but behaves erratically. His inability to display any grief infuriates his father-in-law, Phil (Chris Cooper), who is also his boss.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild) from a screenplay by Bryan Sipe (writer of the gloppy screen adaptation of the gloppy Nicholas Sparks novel The Choice), Demolition takes itself very seriously. It purports to be a profound meditation on something or other; but what exactly? It doesn’t help that in the pre-accident scenes, Julia (Heather Lind) is as cold a fish as Davis.

Not long after Julia’s death, Davis reflects out loud that since his wife has been gone, everything he has encountered has been a metaphor for something else. Ah, metaphor! We’re getting serious here.

That clunky observation is meant to clue us in to this self-regarding movie’s literary pretensions, gleaned perhaps from some misbegotten writers’ workshop. Sure enough, there are metaphors aplenty, and they are wielded with the heaviness of the sledgehammer Davis uses, first at a construction site and later at his picture-perfect suburban home, to demolish the remains of his former life.

Another metaphor is the broken vending machine in the hospital where Julia dies. When it won’t disgorge the peanut M&M’s he paid for, Davis begins writing letters of complaint to the manufacturer. In the letters, he confesses his lifelong unhappiness and marital disappointment. Eventually, he receives a reply from Karen (Naomi Watts), a customer service representative who is moved by the honesty of his confessional ravings, and he begins stalking her.

When they eventually meet, he discovers she is living with a possessive lout (C. J. Wilson) and has a 12-year-old son, Chris (Judah Lewis), who loves hard rock music and is uncertain about his sexuality.

The actors do their best to flesh out characters who might as well be stick figures conceived on a drawing board with arrows pointing this way and that. You expect Davis and Karen to begin some kind of romance, and when they remain chaste friends, you can practically hear the movie congratulating itself for defying expectations and taking what some might call the high road.

Mr. Lewis is a promising young actor, but no sooner has the screenplay brought up his sexual confusion than it nervously drops the subject, the better to concentrate on its money shots, in which Davis gleefully destroys his glass house and everything in it and finally has a bulldozer knock down the facade. You can’t help shuddering as you calculate the property damage.

Having achieved liberation, Davis skips down the streets of Manhattan in a state of manic euphoria that the movie portrays as freedom. And yes, he can finally get in touch with his feelings, become human and shed a tear.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of (screenplay by) Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

[CSW] -2.4- It's hard to put this movie into a category. The central story arc about a disattached young man struggling with his wife's death and a number of other smaller events throughout the story certainly make it a drama overall. The only reason to call it a romantic comedy/drama are the flashbacks the main character has of his marriage. And of course comedy is dotted throughout the movie particularly in the main character's interactions with Naomi Watt's character and her son. With all these pieces, the movie tries to do a lot and manages to develop most of them to my satisfaction. I enjoyed the movie for how well it showed the struggle to rediscover a way of life after a tragedy, although it wasn't in a way that I would call normal.
[4.5V-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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