Review of Demolition (2016) by Josh F — 18 Sep 2016

Demolition is a film about a man who is trying to cope with the fact that his wife died and that he may never have truly loved her. I struggled with this character a lot. The biggest problem I had was with the opening scenes which are pre-death and pre-grief. I feel like the entire film might have made sense to me if he had a somewhat normal personality in the beginning, like he actually cared about something. That way when he switched to grief mode I could accept that all this stuff was his mind's crazy method of coping. But since he appears to be almost robotic from the very beginning, I cannot see any shift and so I started to wonder if he's just dealing with some kind of mental disorder that inhibits his emotional responses. The really strange part of the film is that later he latches onto a woman and her young son, and somehow he becomes a kind of role model to the boy. That relationship seems muddled because in one scene he almost seems wise when having a discussion about sexuality, but then that is undermined by a scene where he gives shockingly awful advice and basically tells the kid it's OK to shoot people.

Demolition also includes a lot of heavy metaphors which I never enjoy all that much. Most notably, as the title suggests, the main character likes to tear things apart. The film-makers basically call themselves out in one scene where the voice-over talks about how "everything has become a metaphor", but just because they admit to the metaphorical excess doesn't magically make it good. I think Gyllenhaal delivered what the film-makers wanted, but the performance was fairly flat and one-note. Naomi Watts had a more interesting part that intrigued me, it's kind of sad how they gradually phase her out of the film. Chris Cooper is playing the same exact grumpy old man that he's been playing for the last decade or more. I thought Judah Lewis was probably the standout in the cast, since his performance showed a depth of talent beyond his years. In general, I struggled with Demolition, but I suspect it will resonate with some audiences. It's not a bad film, I just felt there were some bad choices made which kept it from being a good film for me.