Demolition

Demolition is the latest film from Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild) and stars Jake Gyllenhaal in another of his roles as a dejected man who seems incapable of feeling emotions, a bit like how I felt at the end of this film.

Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) works in investment banking for his father-in-law Phil (Chris Cooper). Davis and his wife Julia (Heather Lind) are involved in a serious car-crash, and whilst she’s killed, he suffers only minor injuries. Wandering the wings of the hospital afterwards, he has an encounter with a dodgy vending machine and writes a complaint letter to the company that owns it, explaining his troubles for context in a unique form of grief that could only belong to a Gyllenhaal character. However, things take an interesting turn for Davis when he receives a response from customer service representative Karen (Naomi Watts). What follows is one of the most leisurely paced, unprofound, waffling films that we’ve seen so far this year.

Demolition starts off promisingly - a car-crash that will undoubtedly send Davis into a cinematic spiral of insanity - but what follows is...well, tedious. There’s always a couple each year, the films that could be brilliant but end up a conceited mess. Think Words and Pictures. Demolition is one of those. I’m not one to dismiss character-centric dramas, in fact I tend to take a high-horse attitude and think that if you judge a film solely on its supposed ‘lack of plot’, you’re most likely a toddler who hasn’t learnt to think for themselves - bloody plebs, am I right?. But the characters in Demolition are either unrelatable or just plain unlikable, which doesn’t leave much of interest to draw you in.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout there are these little references to 9/11, and whether intentional or not it felt as if it’s was pushing a not-so-subtle message toward how grief has evolved in a post-9/11 America. It also keeps drawing weird linkages between Davis’s dejection and how it could be cured by embracing his inner child. Whilst normally these would be buried deep into our subconscious viewing of the film, in Demolition there’s not a lot more to focus on and so they stand out like a sore thumb. It starts to skate the thin line between intellectual cinema and ‘art for art's sake’.

You also get the impression that detail is important to Davis, and so little close-up montages are scattered throughout. They work but only to a certain point, even though the editing is one of the better takeaways from this. Don’t get me wrong, there are other positives as well. There’s a scene right at the end with a carousel which was about the only time I felt something in the nearly two-hour run time, is that a positive? There’s certainly a handful of funny moments but it’s not laugh-out-loud. A lot of Yves Bélanger’s cinematography is well-constructed and interesting, even if the film isn’t. You can tell that both Gyllenhaal and Watts are invested in crafting good performances but that never really happens because of deeply flawed character writing/direction.

In the early stages of Davis’s downfall, you see him meticulously take things apart, but never put them back together. This film feels a bit like that, a series of scenes that should have some sort of coherence as a whole, but just don’t. It’s not awful, just frustrating, tedious, a waste of talent and of your time.

Wild

Last year I reviewed the Aussie film Tracks, a film about a girl with a rough background walking across the desert. This week I watched Wild, a film about a girl with a rough background walking the Pacific Crest Trail, a hike that goes from Mexico to Canada. Like with Tracks, Jean-Marc Vallée's latest film didn't really inspire me the way these films are supposed to.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is a wreck after the death of her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) and divorces her husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski) after he finds that she's cheated on him. To get her life back on track, Cheryl decides to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way she meets a fair few people who she relates to, as well as some unsavoury characters who just want to use her.

While I appreciate the film's overall message (despite it not doing anything to me), I feel like Vallée's filmmaking is all over the place here. The structure and editing don't do much help make sense of the story. Non-linear films can be fun to watch and sometimes they can give backstory to characters, as is the intention with this film. However, the flashbacks that we do see are very fragmented and brief, giving only a cursory insight to Cheryl's motivations and thus not making her a very endearing character.

The film suffers from an overabundance of narration. Scenes where we should read into Witherspoon's performance are interrupted by obvious narration of what's going on in her mind. The film's epilogue is also rushed along with a solid minute monologue at the end of the film, felt like something a teenager would write at the end of a story to let the reader know that everything would be okay. This could have been cut out entirely and given time for the audience to breathe and come to their own conclusions on whether Cheryl achieved her redemption.

Thematically the film is very much on the nose, holding hands with the audience the entire time. Such is the nature of a poorly done CGI fox who represents the soul of her mother and you know this from the moment you see it. Also, whilst I am not one of those hideous men's rights people and I fully support feminist films (and this is a great example of one, up there perhaps with Jackie Brown), every man, bar her brother and ex-husband, comes across like they wish to take advantage of Cheryl and I truly was scared for her at times. I don't feel like this needed to happen every time to remind the audience that there is that fear that Cheryl carries with her.

With this being a film with a lone main character, I had expected to see Witherspoon for the entire film. She gives a superb performance, something I haven't seen her do since Pleasantville. The fact that there are too little supporting roles, or if there are, they aren't in it for long, that irked me a little. Laura Dern comes back time and time again in the flashbacks, but I didn't feel a strong connection to her. Thomas Sadoski and Gaby Hoffman, who plays Cheryl's friend, both get a pitiful amount of screen time and I would have loved to see a lot more of W. Earl Brown.

Jean-Marc Vallée is capable of making better movies as we saw with Dallas Buyers Club and I know that all the actors can do better than this and despite this movie having some Oscar nominations based on it's strong female characters, it isn't a too exciting movie.

Dallas Buyers Club

Lately Matthew McConaughey has really shown that he is the serious actor that he has always been. After a breakout role in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, he took on a lot less challenging roles in rom-coms like Fool's Gold, How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days and The Wedding Planner. But over the last few years he is starring in more serious films that showcase his fantastic acting ability. Dallas Buyers Club may be his best ever.

Ron Woodroof (McConaughey) is a homophobic electrician and rodeo cowboy. After a work accident, Ron wakes up in hospital to discover that he is HIV positive and is given only thirty days to live by his doctors. Initially in denial about his condition, Ron soon accepts his fate and begins looking at medicines that can help. After running out of a trial medication, he travels to Mexico to find a doctor who has some medication. The doctor puts him onto a new medication which Ron decides to start selling in the US. In hospital, Ron meets Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender woman, and the two start doing business together.

McCaonaughey gives a captivating performance as Woodroof. His magnetic acting skills give Woodroof a deep and meaningful character. One scene, where Ron realises how he managed to contract the virus is a true testament to his skill, not to mention his huge weight loss which really showed his dedication to the role.

Jared Leto's return to the screen is with a mesmerising performance as Rayon. This is Leto's first role since the sci-fi flick Mr. Nobody, but he's also had some good roles in Requiem for a Dream and American Psycho. His performance here is absolutely amazing and heartbreaking at the same time.

Verdict: A fantastic film about about a part of the Aids crisis that I knew very little about.