In anticipation of the film’s arrival at the beginning of next month, We Got This Covered caught up with Gyllenhaal to discuss his role in the awards-friendly drama, the preparation required and working with Jean-Marc Vallée.
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And so the contrivances of Bryan Sipe’s screenplay converge: Davis starts to take apart the bathroom stalls and light fixtures at the office and spreads the components of a $200 cappuccino maker on his garage floor.
Chris Cooper (left) and Jake Gyllenhaal.
“It’s so much better and so much more satisfying and ultimately so much more life affirming and makes you feel so much better when you create as opposed to cut down”, Gyllenhaal surmised. I don’t know, sad or something.
While not a five-star affair, with Demolition, Gyllenhaal again proves he’s one of our finest film actors, in a story rife with meaning for anyone who’s ever suffered loss and reevaluated everything.
His character, Davis Mitchell, a Wall Street investment banker, is stunned into an nearly trancelike state of grief by the sudden death in a auto crash of his wife (Heather Lind).
But he’s also unfeeling. This woman, played by Naomi Watts, becomes his vehicle to re-evaluate life in general. She’s intrigued by his situation, drawn in by the feeling he can show here but nowhere else. For instance, some scenes practically telegraph how they’re going to play out before they even happen, like when Davis foolishly decides to bring Karen to his late wife’s charity event, which is hosted by his former in-laws. In a weird twist, contrary to what you would expect in that situation, it’s Davis who seems to be consoling the man and not the other way round.
He begins by dismantling the expensive refrigerator whose annoying leak he and his wife had been discussing when she died.
However, where the movie falls apart, if you’ll pardon the awful wordplay, is during all the time spent with its namesake activity.
Together, they form a band of people in search of their own identities. They bond, as do Davis and her adolescent son Chris (Judah Lewis in a standout performance), a foul-mouthed kid questioning his sexuality. At the hospital, just before she dies, Davis tries to buy a bag of Peanut M&Ms from a vending machine.
The metaphors are heavy-handed. Davis’ eventual involvement in their lives has an oddly neutralizing effect on the teenager, who’s awed to meet someone more reckless than he is. He does this with a natural kind of enthusiasm – he throws himself into it, as he does here.
MPAA rating: R for language, some sexual references, drug use and disturbing behavior. These letters get the attention of single mother Karen (Naomi Watts, playing a character whose main personality trait is that she smokes weed) who works customer service for the company. Jean-Marc Vallée’s follow-up to his excellent Wild and his middling Dallas Buyers Club concerns a man who seeks catharsis through smashing things.
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BOTTOM LINE: A well written and acted movie about death, grief and living life.
