TIFF kicked off its 40th-anniversary season with this bold, indelible drama starring a never-better Jake Gyllenhaal.
Losing someone close to you — a parent, a spouse, a child — is a universally devastating experience. But how you process the tidal wave of pain and confusion that drags you down in the aftermath varies from person to person. It depends on the state of your relationship with the deceased, the circumstances of your life at the moment the tragedy strikes and, ultimately, who you are as a person.
Demolition — the latest TIFF darling from Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée — opens on just such a loss, as the viewer is dropped into the middle of a conversation between New York investment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his wife Julia (Heather Lind), as she drives him to work. He stares out the window, nodding along, she calls him out for not paying attention and then they’re T-boned in an intersection. He awakes at a hospital to the sound of his father-in-law/boss (Chris Cooper) telling him “She’s gone.”
Jake Gyllenhaal poses with fans at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
This all amounts to only a couple minutes of screen time. What makes the next 90 so uniquely, breathlessly compelling is that we’ve never seen a character quite like Davis respond to a loss in quite this way.
In the coming weeks, we’ll watch him obsessively dismantle home appliances, fervently tear down a house wall by wall with heavy-duty power tools, among other, less savoury activities. He’s not sad, nor is he angry; at times, he’s disconnected; at times, weirdly meditative; at times, downright gleeful.
The people around him are predictably confused and, on occasion, horrified — setting up several blackly hilarious exchanges between Gyllenhaal and his baffled friends, family and really anyone who happens to stumble into his off-kilter orbit.
A notable exception is Karen Moreno (the always-welcome Naomi Watts), a lonely customer service rep with whom Davis strikes up an unlikely friendship after taking a timeout during his wife’s wake to write a complaint letter to her vending machine company. Much of his time is spent connecting with the equally lost Karen, serving as a wonderfully demented father figure to her rabble-rousing teenaged son (Judah Lewis), both of whom come to embrace Davis’s erratic endeavours. They realize what the audience comes to: he’s not so much unravelling as he is searching.
Naomi Watts dazzles on the red carpet at Demolition's TIFF premiere.
Searching not just for his missing grief, but the spark that was missing from his life long before that car accident. He’s stripping the callouses from his soul and chasing real, raw feeling in all its forms — whether that means dancing to heavy-metal music on a crowded sidewalk during rush hour or eagerly taking a bullet to the chest.
Gyllenhaal is the ideal performer to bring this distinct brand of near-madness to life. His greatest career successes have found him playing dark, disturbed leading men, and here he brings just the right blend of unhinged charm and menace, balanced by the subtlest hint of pathos. Beneath all the crazy, we get the oh-so-relatable sense of a man who’s lost and trying to find himself; and there’s something unexpectedly cathartic about watching a person physically demolish their own ennui with a sledgehammer.
Director Jean-Marc Vallée and star Jake Gyllenhaal map out a scene on the set of Demolition.
Demolition is a remarkably full film, alternately thrilling, hilarious, poignant and uplifting, but above all unpredictable. Vallée — with his usual gritty, kinetic panache — deftly wrangles the various conflicting tones and plays them against each other to craft a uniquely enthralling experience. We’re never quite sure whether Davis is headed for an inspiring personal breakthrough or if he’s turning into Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver (or maybe both).
When he does reach the end of this journey, the conclusion does feel a touch too neat for such a pleasingly messy, offbeat affair. But it hardly matters. The ride Gyllenhaal and Vallée have taken us on is fresh, indelible and altogether fascinating.
Main Image Credit: TIFF
Matthew Currie
Author
A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...
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