Jake Gyllenhaal loses his wife and his balance in offbeat film about grieving

Opinion

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This article was published 07/04/2016 (3447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A wife is driving her husband to work. She is distracted at an intersection and their car is T-boned. The husband manages to escape without injury. The wife is killed.

Thus begins this curious comedy-drama about grieving.

We’re not talking about Ryan O’Neal in picturesque brood over the loss of Ali McGraw in Love Story here. The husband, Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) emerges from the trauma in a kind of emotional stasis. Instead of engaging with his supportive parents or his heartbroken in-laws (Chris Cooper and Polly Draper), he begins a written correspondence with an anonymous customer service representative of a snack vendor company after failing to get a package of peanut M&Ms from the machine in the hospital waiting room.

The rep, Karen (Naomi Watts) has troubles of her own. She’s a single mom with a predilection for smoking pot alone in the bathtub. She’s contemplating a permanent relationship with her boss, a man she doesn’t love. Karen’s teen son Chris (Judah Lewis) is troubled. Recognizing a kinship of alienation, she reaches out to Davis.

For his part, Davis has a revelation that “everything has become a metaphor” and he proceeds to literally deconstruct the sources of his unease, taking apart a computer and a bathroom door at the investment firm where he works for his father-in-law, and later demolishing the sterile modernist home he once shared with his wife. He would appear to be taking the term “breakdown” literally.

In one of the film’s more acerbic moments, we see Davis looking in the mirror, his face a mask of torment. It becomes apparent he’s practising looking sad for the funeral.

The fact that this doesn’t turn you against Davis is a tribute to Gyllenhaal’s work, a tricky task of making you feel for a character who is not himself in the feeling business. When Davis volunteers to do some work for a demolition firm and accidentally steps on a nail on the job site, he feels a touch of joy in knowing he can still feel pain. It emerges that his best hope for emotional equilibrium might be in coming to the aid of Chris, who is about to face a crisis of his own.

Scripted by Brian Sipe and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), Demolition is a film that recognizes that grief is a mysterious thing, and it doesn’t necessarily follow the anger-bargaining-acceptance template. Sometimes it manifests itself in the most bizarre ways, befitting the tangled complexity of human relationships unexpectedly rent asunder.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing