With “Demolition,” French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée establishes himself as an auteur. Having directed “Dallas Buyers Club” and “Wild,” themes and patterns start to emerge. All three films deal with the paper-thin line between life and death; how death informs life, inspiring people to live harder, live sweeter, to the extreme. In these films, death is something that makes the living push the boundaries of life as far and as hard as they can.
Vallée has a talent for wordy, writerly scripts, and “Demolition” is no exception. Written by Bryan Sipe, the screenplay uses an epistolary device to let us in on our protagonist’s inner life. The leading man is Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal), who begins to write letters to the customer service department of a vending machine company in the immediate aftermath of his wife, Julia’s (Heather Lind), death in a car accident.
It’s a strange coping mechanism, to be sure. But it’s clear that it’s much easier to write a letter to a vending machine company, because he was jilted out of $1.25 and a bag of peanut M&Ms, than to the driver of the car that slammed into his, or to the doctors who could not save her. The customer-service department is his only outlet, an anonymous source to whom he can confess his thoughts about his marriage (just OK), his job (investment banking), his demanding father-in-law (his boss, played by Chris Cooper).
But the customer service department is a person, Karen (Naomi Watts), and she reaches out, tentatively, proffering a nugget of compassion, an escape from his perfectly regimented and designed life. Her friendship, perhaps a catalyst, coincides with Davis’ breakdown. That word is quite literal in this case, at least in the environmental sense.