It is all the harder to swallow the premise of this fanciful film when it starts out with its antihero (Jake Gyllenhaal) writing the first of a series of lengthy personal missives to the customer service department of a vending company that cheated him out of $1.25. This in the emergency room of a hospital where his wife was just pronounced dead.
Serving as a vehicle for Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) to eventually meet the vending company representative Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts) who reads his heartfelt letters, the writing of them sort of begins to make sense once the realization strikes that Davis is one tortured, looney dude.
Expressions of grief may take on all sorts of manifestations but in Davis’s case, he’s rather unique. He likes to dismantle things–expensive things, including a computer or two in the investment office where he works under his equally distraught, punctilious father-in-law (an excellent Chris Cooper). While the meetings with Karen progress from oddball cutesy to more pensive, Davis’s grieving graduates from taking things apart to busting them up.
The film’s funniest scene has Davis jumping out of his car clad in a suit and tie and offering to help a wrecking crew who are about to take down a house. After pleading to work for free, Davis eventually ups the ante and actually pays the crew the entire $141 in his wallet. The reactions of the cynical, flinching contractor is priceless.
Demolition is ultimately no comedy. Gyllenhaal, continuing to play the type of outsider, mentally fragile character he so well portrayed in Nightcrawler, does a great job in almost saving this movie from its excesses of fragmentary capriciousness. It’s a film of some fine moments even if its better impulses almost go up in flames in a series of somewhat manipulative plot turns during its finale. Davis’s scenes with Karen’s challenging 15-year-old son (Judah Lewis) mostly ring true.
What Demolition has to say about grieving is certainly insightful and oddly entertaining, yet those aspects seem distinct from, rather than overlapping with, its lighthearted, prosaic quirkiness. Director Jean-Marc Vallee previously helmed Wild and Dallas Buyers Club. Screenwriter Bryan Sipe also wrote the Nicholas Spark stinker The Choice.