In recent years we’ve seen great flowerings of filmmaking from countries as far-flung as Iran, Mexico, South Korea, and Romania. The foreign scene that appears to be hottest right now is Quebec. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Canada has a film-industry infrastructure as efficient as any other country’s, and with Quebecois people taught to speak French and English, it gives their filmmakers access to vast pools of talent in both the Anglophone and Francophone world. Directors from Quebec who have landed on our radar include Denis Villeneuve (Sicario), Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar), Xavier Dolan (Mommy), and the éminence grise Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montreal). Not least of those is Jean-Marc Vallée, whose Dallas Buyers Club and Wild became Oscar contenders. Unlike those, his latest film, Demolition, is not a biopic and it’s not being released during awards season, but it turns a weak script into a watchable and funny piece about bereavement.
The movie begins with a car accident that leaves New York City investment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) unscathed while his wife Julia (Heather Lind) is killed in the driver’s seat. In the wake of this, Davis goes numb and somewhat insane. With no one to talk to, he exhaustively analyzes his marriage in a series of anguished complaint letters to a vending machine company whose machine failed to dispense a $1.25 bag of peanut M&Ms to him in the hospital where Julia died. His need for analysis leads him to compulsively take things apart, starting with the refrigerator that Julia complained was leaking and eventually extending to his entire house, a glass-and-steel modernist monstrosity that deserves its fate.
That opening car accident is far from the only cliché indulged in by screenwriter Bryan Sipe, whose last film was the unendurable The Choice. Of course Davis is going to find a woman to heal his wounds, in this case Karen (Naomi Watts), a customer-service rep for the vending machine firm who reads his letters. Of course Davis has a strained relationship with Julia’s dad (Chris Cooper), who also happens to be his boss. Of course Davis discovers, while he’s dismantling his house, that Julia was hiding something important from him. At heart, this story is just like a thousand other soft-boiled Hollywood melodramas about picking up the pieces and moving on.
This would have been just as unbearable if not for Vallée’s direction. He covers much of the scene-setting in clipped fashion, showing us Julia’s funeral and wake in a couple of shots that last no more than two seconds without background music. His approach dries out the material and makes it light enough to digest. Cinematographer Yves Bélanger photographs this with an unfussy grit, without resorting to the soft-focus shots that you so often find in movies like this.
Vallée finds comedy in these characters’ not-so-cuddly weirdness, as Davis finds himself spending an afternoon in an airport lobby and fantasizing about becoming a domestic terrorist. For her part, Karen is given her own set of issues with weed and her troubled teenage son Chris (Judah Lewis), and soon after contacting Davis she admits that she has been stalking him. Davis becomes a cracked sort of mentor to Chris, an undersized kid who’s into lipstick and women’s clothes as well as fooling around with live ammunition. Davis encourages all of this, including playing a game involving a loaded gun. (Outrageously irresponsible though this is, it makes sense when you recall that Davis is desperately trying to feel something.) The lead actors all play this largely for dry humor, and it works well enough that when Davis later dances through the streets of New York while listening to Free’s funky “Mr. Big,” it doesn’t feel like a dishonest piece of uplift but like an uptight guy learning how to chill.
That sort of encapsulates what the movie as a whole does. Because the director and actors know exactly what tone to strike, Demolition comes off as neither overly sentimental nor laden with quirks. Instead, it’s a movie that earns Jake Gyllenhaal dancing joyfully through the streets of New York. That’s good, then.
[box_info]Demolition
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Written by Bryan Sipe. Rated R. [/box_info]
