After seeing Louder than Bombs the day before, I had a real feeling of deja vu in the early parts of Demolition. Here, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Davis, a man struggling to cope with life after his wife is killed in a car crash.
Unable to carry on his day-to-day existence working in a finance company run by his father-in-law (Chris Cooper), Davis starts behaving oddly, taking machines apart and then even smashing up his own house. He also starts a correspondence with a vending machine employee (Karen, Naomi Watts) after the vending machine in the hospital he used the night his wife died was not working. That correspondence blossoms into a friendship of sorts.
Louder than Bombs certainly has its faults but I didn’t doubt Gene’s love for his deceased wife. In this film, I struggled to buy what Davis goes through is grief as his feelings for his wife seem to be ambivalent at best. As a result his actions make him appear like a bratty teenager rather than a grown man processing his grief. Unsurprisingly, Karen has a disengaged teenage son who Davis bonds with.
Despite that situation being a total cliché, the friendship between Davis and Chris was the most engaging thing in the film, thanks in no small part to Judah Lewis’ performance as Chris. Maybe it is because it is the only point in the film that Davis doesn’t seem to be solely concerned with himself. It seems very convenient that Davis not only works for his father-in-law, thus giving him more scope to play up, and he is so wealthy he can take indefinite time off work without any detrimental financial effects.
The relationship between Davis and Karen doesn’t work as well. It seems like the director, the usually good Jean-Marc Vallée, shied away from having a romantic relationship in case the audience lost sympathy with Davis. Well, that ship had already sailed for me!
Cooper impresses in some emotional scenes, though Watts struggles with her opaque character.
Rating: 4.5 out of 10