‘Demolition’
Rating: R for “language, some sexual references, drug use and disturbing behavior.” Running time: 100 minutes.
What if a young man who just lost his young wife in a car accident experienced none of the stages of grief? What if he felt nothing? What if he, instead, started writing letters to a vending machine company and dismantling every object in sight?
Perhaps that’s just a person coasting in denial, but, to buy that, you would have to believe that the person also had some sort of humanity in the first place. In the case of Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) in director Jean-Marc Vallée’s ambitious, flawed and whimsically sinister “Demolition-” let’s just say that’s not entirely clear. Davis, for much of the movie, is like the Patrick Bateman of widowers. He is incredibly wealthy, cold, unfeeling and vaguely sociopathic. Instead of bodies, though, it’s objects he’s dissecting.
At first, it’s actually quite captivating as you drift with Davis in the aftermath of his wife Julia’s (Heather Lind) death. He was in the car with her when it got broadsided. He came out without a scratch. She died that night.
He can’t even muster up any emotion as her grieving father (Chris Cooper) breaks down. And then at the wake, instead of socializing, he goes into a study to compose a letter to the vending machine company whose hospital unit failed to give him the Peanut M&Ms he paid for. It’s in this handwritten complaint letter where Davis starts to really dish – about how he only got this job at a $6 billion investment firm because of his father-in-law, about his daily routines in his magazine-ready glass and steel cube of a house, about the time he lied to a fellow passenger on the commuter train about what he did for a living, and about how he never really loved his wife.