Film

The Best And Worst Of The 2016 Sydney Film Festival, Reviewed

Sorry, the movie about Daniel Radcliffe's farting corpse is a bit of a stinker.

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The Film That Might Make You Want To Punch Jake Gyllenhaal

Demolition, dir. Jean-Marc Vallée

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper

Reviewed by: Tom Clift

Jean-Marc Vallée is a Quebecois filmmaker whose stylish French language films belie the disappointing direction his career in America has taken. Vallée has carved out a niche in recent years directing over-produced pseudo-indies about self-centred protagonists about whom I could not give less of a shit.

There was the well-intentioned but reductive drama about HIV/AIDs Dallas Buyers Club and the navel-gazing Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wild, now he’s reached peak sad white person with Demolition: a film about a wealthy investment banker whose life is thrown into turmoil when his wife is killed in a car accident that leaves him without a scratch. Yes, it’s another movie in which a dead woman provides the catalyst for an emotionally stunted bloke’s journey of self-discovery. But it’s not even a good journey — Demolition is a trite, superficial new effort which involves Jake Gyllenhaal learning how to feel through smashing things.

Unable to process his grief — or rather, his lack of it — Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) instead becomes obsessed with taking things apart. Light fixtures, bathroom stalls and leaky fridges are disassembled before he eventually takes a sledgehammer to his ultramodern home. It’s meant to be a metaphor. You’ll be clued into that when a character says: “everything has become a metaphor”.

At the same time, Davis pens a series of letters to the Champion Vending Company, whose faulty candy machine in the hospital emergency room failed to dispense a pack of peanut M&Ms. These letters, which include confessions about how he never really loved his wife in the first place, are read by customer service rep and pot-smoking single mother Karen (played by Naomi Watts in maybe the most thankless role of her career). He sounds like a fun guy, Karen presumably says to herself, before she starts following Davis home from work. As quirky meet-cutes go, they don’t get much more contrived.

Thematically, Vallée swings at profundity and misses spectacularly every time. Modern life can be stifling. We are more than our possessions. Grief takes many different forms. Maybe I’m jaded, but these don’t exactly strike me as earth-shattering concepts — particularly when they’re being filtered through the prism of yet another rich, handsome white dude out to find himself. Demolition unfolds with all the narrative and intellectual nuance of a bulldozer being driven through a house. Which, incidentally, is something else we get to see happen in this terrible, terrible film.

For fans of: Donnie Darko-era Jake Gyllenhaal, that scene in Fight Club where he blows his apartment up.

Opening in Australia: July 14

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