Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) certainly has significant problems. In the opening scene of Jean-Marc Vallée’s bizarre psychodrama, we watch as his wife is killed in a head-on crash while he sits beside her in the passenger seat. For all that, he still comes across like a whining baby who should show some bloody gratitude for the favourable cards life has dealt.
Davis didn’t really love his wife, you see. They married because it was convenient (she is actually his boss’s daughter) and remained only loosely entwined throughout their childless relationship. No, what really gets him down is the emptiness of his moneyed, pampered lifestyle. He commutes from a home in White Plains to a Manhattan office where he shuffles billions about to no purpose but the making of more billions. Diddums! Is all that white privilege making you sad?
Chris Cooper, who plays Davis's unhelpful father-in-law, is on hand to remind us of the superficially similar American Beauty.
But what Demolition really suggests is an accidental parody of two distinct movements in American fiction. Following his wife's death, Davis begins, like the hero of a Raymond Carver story, to notice the fidgety components that combine to make the American machine. Consider, for instance, this malfunctioning vending machine in the hospital corridor. When he begins a correspondence with the company that services the device, the film takes on the quality of a postmodern novel by the likes of David Eggers. Karen (Naomi Watts), the head of customer services, does what people do in such stories – but never do in real life – and allows an epistolary romance to develop.
Gyllenhaal does this class of damaged all-American very well. Judah Lewis is genuinely touching as Karen’s sexually questioning son. Vallée has a good eye for a dreamy image. But the film is utterly annihilated by its stylistic contrivance and ludicrous self-importance. It doesn’t even have the decency to remain consistent. The absurdly sentimental final scene appears to have been plucked from a different sort of bad film altogether.
Move on. There are no questions asked here that The Graduate didn't satisfactorily answer half a century ago.
