DEMOLITION, Man

Jean-Marc Vallée is a filmmaker who tends to direct obvious emotional material by underplaying the overstatements and overplaying the understatements. This tendency can really sink a movie, trapping interesting performances, like Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyer’s Club, in a production that’s both too much and not enough in every moment. It takes a great talent with the right material to transcend that approach. (Look no further than what Reese Witherspoon did in Wild.) But this tendency of Vallée’s really works for his latest, Demolition, a story about a character whose life changes so quickly and profoundly that everything about him is off balance. He overreacts to small things – a squeaking door, a faulty vending machine – and finds the biggest problem he’s facing – the sudden death of his wife – hard to react to at all. He’s numb and oversensitive simultaneously, a perfect fit for Vallée’s too much and not enough approach.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe (The Choice) the film is a character study about a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) who doesn’t know what his character is. In the wake of a devastating car accident that viscerally and artfully gets things off on an upset note, he feels overwhelming grief that turns into gnawing emptiness. He just simply doesn’t know how to process his difficult emotions. It wasn’t a happy marriage, but it was what he knew. He can’t acclimatize to a life without his wife (Heather Lind), especially carrying the guilt he feels for doubting if he actually loved her. Worse still, her wealthy father (Chris Cooper) is his boss at the investment firm he suddenly finds hollow and meaningless. He skips work and wanders around, losing weight, skipping shaves, and taking apart annoyances – a leaky pipe, a glitchy computer – with the tools and precision he lacks in dissecting his raw, complicated feelings. He suddenly sees the emptiness of his comfortable life and is at a total loss as to how to go about filling it in with meaning.

Gyllenhaal sells this shell-shocked depression with wet-eyed hangdog blankness, yearning for connection and struggling to find release for his pain. (It’s the internalized opposite of his scary surface striving in Nightcrawler.) Maybe, he thinks, the only solution is more pain, smashing apart his belongings until they draw blood. He’s clearly in a bad place, lashing out with reckless and otherwise odd behavior when he can manage to rouse himself from a depressive daze. Idiosyncratic and moody, textured with fine grain and soft lighting, the film layers in flashes of memories as if to manifest the rattled headspace of its protagonist, explaining his obsessive behaviors and rootless drive to make a change or a connection while maintaining the trauma’s essential unknowable qualities. He alienates his wife’s family, his colleagues, and everyone else he’s known, simply because he know longer knows if the person he is is the person he wants to be.

One outgrowth of this erratic breakdown is unexpected friendship. Remember that faulty vending machine I mentioned he encounters? It’s in the hospital where his wife died, and it ate his money mere minutes after he received the bad news. He sends a letter to the vending company explaining the whole situation. Then he sends three or four more. It’s enough to get the sad, kind-hearted customer service representative (Naomi Watts, radiating empathy) to call him up and ask if he’s okay. This becomes not a romance, but an intimate exchange of sympathy. They lean on each other, becoming fast, close friends. She invites him into her life where he feels comfortable just hanging around, even sparking a big-brotherly relationship with her troubled teen son (newcomer Judah Lewis in a casually terrific performance as a sensitive troublemaker). This could be unbelievable, but the cast sells it. They all portray a desire for a low-key understanding person to hang out with, an unassuming vulnerable tenderness, a fragility beneath playacted toughness. It’s sweetly, warmly developed.

The film’s back half is loaded up with developments, sudden swerves into dramatic complications that weigh an already glum movie down. It’s manipulative, but not entirely unearned. The whole thing works under a melancholic existential panic, with people trying their best to look at the world in a way that makes sense. At one point Gyllenhaal sees an uprooted tree and muses, “everything’s a metaphor.” It’s both a too-obvious statement of the movie’s heavy hand and an acknowledgement of a man casting about for anything to help make sense of an all-encompassing tragic change in his life. It’d make a tidy double feature with Wild, two movies about lost souls setting their own terms for recovery and hoping against hope that a big gesture will accomplish just that. Demolition doesn’t know if anyone can easily launch themselves out of a bad emotional state, but is moving in its assertion that, when you’re at your lowest point, even fleeting kindness can help push you in the right direction.

Walkabout: WILD

Wild is a movie about a troubled woman who sets off by herself and walks over 1,000 miles in three months. It’s a literal journey of self-discovery. The most admirable aspect of the film made out of this trip is its willingness to downplay the discovery in favor of the experience of the isolation. We see her trudge across the wilderness of the Pacific Crest Trail reflecting on her life, cataloging her mistakes, confronting her regrets, and emerging on the other end with a greater understanding of herself. She’s not an immediately better person, but we see the seeds of awareness that will hopefully be flowering in her future. Because the movie’s based on author Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir of the same name, we know she’s about to see better days. The movie doesn’t linger overmuch on her change, giving center stage to the steps along the way.

We meet Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) as she begins her long hike, struggling to stand up after overloading her backpack, a rookie mistake. In other words, she’s dealing with some heavy baggage. Get it? We don’t know why she feels the need to attempt this walk, but there’s a real unease in Witherspoon’s demeanor, a hollowed out rawness that’s about to be bruised and blistered by her chosen ordeal. She’s always been a smart performer, even in movies so breezy or junky (like Legally Blonde or Fear) that it was easy to take her for granted. There’s intelligence behind her bubbliness, her charm, her bright eyes and petite stature. Here, she’s tapping into a shrewd wounded intelligence that’s flatter and glummer than we’ve seen her in quite some time. Her character is in a mental space that slowly reveals itself as coming from a place of addiction and grief.

It’s a terrific performance that anchors what is essentially a character study with a mystery at the center. Who is she? What brought her to this place? That was enough to keep me at least mildly interested. As we follow Cheryl’s walkabout, her backstory is filled in with non-chronological flashes of past. It becomes clear she’s a person whose life hasn’t gone the way she’d hoped, hitting a rough patch of unwanted pregnancy, divorce, substance abuse, and infidelity. We see her relationship with her ex-husband (Thomas Sadoski), and her free spirit mother (Laura Dern). Other figures from her past (like Gaby Hoffmann) come to her mind. Meanwhile, in the present, she encounters all sorts of characters on the trail, fellow hikers, farmers, hippies, college kids, and a guy who says he’s a reporter for The Hobo Times. It’s uneven by its very nature. When it works, fine, but when it doesn’t, I was wishing it would hurry up and move on to the next stop.

Whatever small restraint screenwriter Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education) and director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) show in refusing to find easy lessons in a real life’s complications is partly undone by their stumbling approach caught halfway between sentimental uplift and artful impressionism. It’s a wobbly mix of earnest self-help sparkle and collage of memory and pain. It neither solves the problem of the episodic repetition of depicting the long, mostly lonely, walk, nor uses the grinding monotony of her journey as experiential aesthetic. It gives her moments of insight, danger, despair, and connection, but seems to be trudging along, hitting its emotional mile markers more than it is evoking her mental and physical state.

She’s broken down spiritually, and has to break down bodily to begin to build back up again. That’s moving. Witherspoon’s performance sells it. But the movie itself is at a loss as to how best maximize that asset. Hornby’s script makes fine connections and moving juxtapositions, but Vallée’s direction is so self-consciously loose and scruffy, slipping from past to present with a flat-footed sense of obviousness. He’s simply pointing his camera at ideas of womanhood, literature, illness, and wilderness without actually engaging with the content. It’s representation, not interpretation. Perhaps that’s why he’s so good at capturing great performances and then diluting their potential impact by entombing them in glossy but flavorless movies, like McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club or Emily Blunt in The Young Victoria. Wild is the best of the three, especially worth seeing for Witherspoon successfully stretching her acting muscles. But I wished it could’ve been a wilder, more adventurous movie to better match the material and be worthy of its lead’s good work.

Die Another Day: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Far and away the best reason to see Dallas Buyers Club is Matthew McConaughey. His acting has been the best it’s ever been these last 18 months. He’s an actor of range and talent his early typecasting had done much to hide. After his Dazed and Confused early breakout performance and toiling in roles as idealistic young lawyers (A Time To Kill, Amistad), he became a star on the back of leading shallow shirtless lunkhead roles in increasingly exasperating comedies. But now, after his wide range of interesting supporting roles as of late, he’s grown into a career that’s varied, fascinating, and consistently excellent. With roles as a small-town prosecutor in Bernie, a sleazy hitman in Killer Joe, a strip club proprietor in Magic Mike, a fugitive in Mud, and reporter in The Paperboy, he made great movies (the first three) and less than good movies (the latter two) better for his being there. He went from a name that was no added value to a film’s promotion to a name that causes my attention to perk up when I see it in the cast of an upcoming project.

In Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof a hard-drinking horndog who spends his time gambling and carousing when he’s not picking up day labor as an electrician to supplement his rodeo income. But he’s clearly ill, gaunt, sickly skeletal. McConaughey inhabits this diseased frame with painfully thin confidence, his swagger and charisma shining through so strongly I was afraid all the more that he’d break right in front of our eyes. The soundtrack picks up some high-frequency whines as he winces, overcome with pain as he squints and hopes it’ll pass quickly. It’s after a workplace accident that his blood happens to be drawn and flagged for further testing. The doctors (Jennifer Garner and Denis O’Hare) bring him the sad results: he has HIV. It’s the 1980s and HIV/AIDS is a mystery disease and treatment is fragmentary and rare. It’s widely assumed to be a disease affecting only gay people, so Woodroof, faced with a death sentence, reacts in a homophobic huff. It’s a mistake, he says, storming out of the building.

But what if it’s not a mistake? That’s the question that haunts Woodroof as he comes to accept the diagnosis. Told the best the hospital can do is offer him a spot in a clinical trial that may or may not help him, he researches treatment options, finding useful supplements that are unavailable in the States. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved these apparently helpful substances, so Woodroof sets out to get some, figuring he might as well help his fellow HIV/AIDS patients in the process. Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack’s screenplay relays the events as a sort of big-pharma medical heist story with a libertarian anti-FDA bent, smuggling meds through a loophole and getting them to those in need. Woodroof sets up a Buyers Club, selling memberships that entitle dues-paying customers as much medicine as they need. By not charging for the unapproved chemicals directly, he’s able to avoid directly breaking the law.

It’s the story of a man outliving his initial 30-day diagnosis, an angry prejudiced man thrown by circumstance into a culture he barely knows and doesn’t understand, but is initially certain he hates anyway. An early scene, shortly after his diagnosis sent gay slurs flying off his tongue in denial, finds his friends shunning him, spitting those same slurs back at him. He’s clearly crushed by this betrayal and that association, but soon his hospital roommate, a transgender man named Rayon (Jared Leto), becomes his business partner and friend. They have a fun and unlikely buddy chemistry that feeds into the film’s heist-like patter, even though their gaunt appearances and oft-ragged voices are clear indications that no matter the good they do, the end to their stories won’t be a cure. Even as they get these goods around the law, the FDA is sniffing around, circling, looking for a reason to shut their operation down. It’s about perseverance in a fight between bureaucracy and urgency, between funereal paranoia and hope.

The screenplay leans on speechifying and easy lessons, but has performances so electric that there’s a sense of liveliness to it all. Director Jean-Marc Vallée is hardly a subtle director. Why, the opening scene cross cuts a distractedly shot sex scene with a panting horse nearly throwing a rider in the rodeo, as if to make completely sure even the least observant audience member immediately gets the metaphor for risky behavior as HIV danger. There’s no room for subtlety here with filmmaking that’s largely only functional. But Vallée trusts his actors to put across this material, letting them express complexities of emotions in scenes that give them full attention. McConaughey runs away with the film with his frighteningly wiry intensity, balancing charm and disreputability, acting circles around Leto’s impressive-in-its-own-way look-ma-I’m-acting roller coaster of laughing, crying, flirting, and coughing.

It’s a film that’s largely a safe, solid, moralizing based-on-a-true-story message movie with plentiful generic uplift and triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity good feelings. But the acting is so strong, from McConaughey especially, that the performers manage to make it worthwhile. It might’ve seemed irredeemably phony if it were not for such a solid lead performance holding the whole thing together. If you want a more comprehensive, deeply felt, fully contextualized look at the 1980’s fight against the AIDS virus and those who would deny full opportunities for help, I’ll point you to last year’s excellent documentary How to Survive a Plague. But if you want to get a glimpse at the subject while appreciating yet again why McConaughey has become one of our most reliably excellent actors, here’s your chance. He sells everything down to the smallest moments, making subtlely out of broadness. I particularly like a scene in which he accompanies Rayon to a gay bar looking to recruit new Buyers Club members. He silently gives beefcake photos on the wall the side-eye, as if to suggest a man who is almost, but not quite, willing to loosen his bigotry in order to help his fellow man.