Critics reviews

The yuppie-finding-his-soul scenario is a very old and not particularly compelling one, and the fact that this film borrows elements from "Regarding Henry," "American Beauty," Saul Bellow's "Herzog," and the Jim Carrey "Liar, Liar," for heaven's sake, does not exactly redound to its benefit. However, Vallée directs with no small amount of verve and energy, as if he genuinely believes he can bring something new to this particular table.

[Davis] has to break down his life and rebuild it in order to feel something, and it's hard not to sense that Vallée and Sipe are doing the same thing with their film, presenting pieces in search of a whole. And while these fragments don't all quite come together, Demolition does close out with a series of emotional bursts that have an undeniable cumulative power and retroactively justify its hesitant, disconnected quality. Amazingly, if awkwardly, the experiment works.

Like the most facile sections of American Beauty — with which it shares much in common, including a tightly wound Chris Cooper — Demolition takes aim at the sterile trappings of bourgeois privilege, smashing them into splinters in order to access the real truth underneath.

Having spent so much time and energy taking apart Davis' materialism and sense of emptiness—and having traded his toolbox for a bulldozer, both figuratively and very, very literally—the movie can't seem to figure out how to make heads or tails of the pieces or how they could fit into a moment of catharsis. It pastes together whatever it can with insincere goop, still wet and sticky as the credits roll.

Vallée, working from a script by Bryan Sipe, packs in too many symbols and potent signifiers—some are harmless, others are literally sledgehammer heavy. The movie doesn't need all that when it's got Gyllenhaal. Davis was in the car during the accident that killed his wife, but he emerged with barely a scratch. All of his damage is on the inside, and Gyllenhaal expresses that in controlled doses.

After watching the film, I was still convinced of Vallée's eye and instinct for pacing and his rapport with actors, but I was less sure of his taste in scripts. No matter how much conviction and oomph Vallée and his actors bring to every line or episode, the characters are so flat, the action so whimsical, and the black humor so self-conscious that you're apt to zone out midway through.

Vallée's film itself comes to feel like the victim of an identity crisis: Demolition is too self-aware and strange to become the mawkish, class-blind fantasy it sometimes appears to be, but it's too busy breaking stuff to develop a more persuasive message.

Show, don't tell' is a long-established filmmaking maxim, but here director Jean-Marc Vallée bends and twists it into 'Tell, then show': seeing a fallen tree, the newly self-aware Davis muses that "everything has become a metaphor for my life", whereupon the movie repeatedly illustrates its own title-flagged metaphor until the audience is virtually begging for mercy.

Despite a fine lead performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, "Demolition," Vallée's latest, isn't on a par with his other recent films. Telling of a man whose life takes several bizarre turns after his wife is killed in a car accident, it has a story that's so random and haphazard it leaves you wondering, "Who could have read this script and thought it would make a good film?

Certainly Demolition was nothing to crow about, and while the opener of any fest is often an easy target, it was dismaying to read the programmer-in-chief boasting that he and his colleagues couldn't have tailor-made a better film for the purpose. That's because Jean-Marc Vallée, apparently desirable after hosting awards-courting performances in Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, surpasses his directorial tendency toward tone-deaf politics with the bizarre douchebag-liberation narrative of his newest.

As Davis tries to engage with the world, Vallée weaves an emotional tapestry through his elliptical narrative style that resonates more deeply than anything he's made before, achieved in part because of Gyllenhaal's career-best performance.

Vallée's directing has a transparent simplicity in its attention to characters and story while also continuing to explore subjective point of views and editing. Demolition is Vallée's greatest film as it combines the best qualities of Café de flore and Dallas Buyers Club. It's his most free spirited film with one the great new American actors. The music in it, as you could expect, is great too.