Never has a leading man taken so many showers in a single film as Jake Gyllenhaal soaps his way thru in DEMOLITION. He’s in great shape so it’s no burden to look at him, but you’d be hard-pressed to see this much skin on a gym-mate you’ve been spotting for years. Under director Jean-Marc Vallée, working off Bryan Sipe’s script, the fleshly display feels more like actor bait than the psychological profile of recent widower Gyllenhaal he going for. Something that holds for most of his attention grabbing actions and constant narration (of his own narrative) in his character’s emotional arc. Catatonic grief to macro-aggression, all Method Acting exercise, showy displays of obsessive-compulsive disorder, jump-started when he writes an overly confessional complaint letter to a vending machine company after his wife’s death in a car crash that left him physically without a scratch. Psychologically a walking wreck, he’s unable to grieve, unable to resolve issues he had with his wife, unable to work normally, unable to do anything but demolish objects. But he needs to break thru something more than a wall. Enter the previously anonymous woman he wrote those letters to, single-mother Naomi Watts, along with her sexually confused teenage ‘emo’ son. You know the drill on these things, push everyone away until you hit bottom, then build your way back to a new sort of balance. But when the film’s not too obvious, it’s pushing too hard. Having Watts show at a memorial gathering or seeing Gyllenhaal, in surrogate father mode, take up duty as target practice to the boy’s William Tell act. Talk about irresistible actor bait!
DOUBLE-BILL/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A year before DEMOLITION, Vallée made another recovery from personal tragedy film in WILD/’14 (not seen here). OR: Similar territory covered in uneven but better fashion: FEARLESS/’93; dir. Peter Weir with Jeff Bridges.
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