“Demolition” (2015) Movie Review: Investment Banker Turned Construction Worker

Either investment banking really sucks, or they lack good Wall Street therapists—either way, this movie shows the strange turns that the grieving process can take for a truly desperate person.

This is what happens to Wall Street slime ball David Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose wife Julia (Heather Lind) dies within the first 10 minutes of the movie while they bicker over their leaking refrigerator.

At the hospital David appears to lack the emotions that one would expect from a grieving husband. When Julia dies, David realizes that he is hungry and decides to buy a candy bar from a vending machine in the waiting room. But this isn’t really David’s lucky day—the candy gets stuck in the machine and he never gets his sweet relief. Later, under the pretense of asking for a refund, David begins writing a series of letters about his life to Champion Vending Machines’ customer service department. One day, to his surprise, his letters receive a response—from sympathetic and good-looking Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts), who is moved by the life that David describes in his letters.

In his letters David admits that he may not have really loved his job or even his wife. David is unable to open up to anyone in his life, including his parents, about the alienation that he clearly feels—yet he is able to express this grief anonymously to a stranger when he thinks that no one is listening. It turns out that sympathy is all that David really needed, and receiving it leads to some major changes in his life—eventually he quits the job he does not enjoy and destroys his own house with a bulldozer he buys on eBay.

“Demolition” raises important questions about what we really want out of life and what truly makes us happy. Are we all just lying—to ourselves and to others—or do we actually enjoy what we are doing?

This movie will definitely appeal to fans of “American Beauty” or any fan of emotional, thought-provoking films. Maybe sometimes we are so ruthless and so numb in our everyday lives that we have to destroy the lives we’ve built in order to make room for something new?

As David’s boss-cum-father-in-law (Chris Cooper) observes, “If you want to fix something, you have to take it apart and put it back together”.

Check out the trailer for the movie below.