While grief is one of the most unruly emotions, movies about grief are usually dour and predictable affairs. Killing off a character's significant other is simply too easy a way to garner sympathy for that character, which is why it’s a relief that Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) in director Jean-Marc Vallèe’s Demolition never asks for sympathy at all. Faced with his wife Julia’s death in a car crash that he survived without a scratch, Davis seems numb to reality. He’s unable to perform his grief in a socially acceptable way, disturbing those around him, especially his father-in-law/boss Phil (Chris Cooper).
Instead of accepting sympathy and honoring Julia’s memory as Phil does, Davis remains emotionally inaccessible to friends and family while feeling compelled to unburden himself of illusions to strangers. Davis indulges in flights of imagination both in his head (illustrated by cutaway visuals from Vallèe) and in real interactions with people that go gloriously off the rails of the expected, such as responding to a man’s question about how he feels by pulling the emergency brake on a train. Acts like this make Demolition thrillingly unpredictable, as Davis upends rote social interactions at every turn, accentuated by Vallèe’s kinetic and musical style. Thoughts and ideas from just prior to the crash recur as compulsions for Davis, such as a suggestion that he fix the refrigerator inspiring him to leave it in pieces on the floor, leading to a full-scale addiction to taking things apart that doesn’t end until his entire house is in ruins.
Davis’ most revealing interaction is a series of letters he writes to a vending machine company, after a machine denied him his peanut M&M’s in the hospital minutes after his wife’s death. Writing into the void, Davis’s letters quickly evolve from a mere complaint to a full scale dismantling of his life; how he cheated through college, got an inessential high-paying job through nepotism, how he had mixed feelings about his wife and himself – basically, how he feels totally unmoored from any sense of meaning or purpose. Because this is a movie, another lost soul, Karen (Naomi Watts), is intoxicated by his honesty and materializes at the other end of those letters. Karen and her troubled fifteen-year-old son provide Davis some measure of grounding as he finally comes to terms with his life.
Demolition is a film fraught with danger, in that there is every opportunity to fall into the traps of mawkishness or quirk overload. But it’s rescued from this fate by a tightly controlled sense of tone from Vallèe and a ferociously committed performance from Gyllenhaal, who conveys a unique mix of estrangement and openness. There are valid reasons to dislike the film, from Davis’ blithe privilege to the manipulative beginning and ending, but ultimately Demolition succeeds because it zigs where other movies would zag, it jumps and screams where others would sit and cry, and it shows death not only as a tragedy to endure but also as a potential reawakening for the survivors.
