TORONTO: Jake Gyllenhaal takes a bulldozer to his own life as a man unhinged by grief in "Demolition," which opened North America's largest film festival in Toronto on Thursday.
In the drama by Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee, Gyllenhaal plays a New York investment banker, Davis Mitchell, who starts to unravel after his wife is killed in a car crash.
Pressed by his father-in-law to pull it together, Mitchell instead launches into an obsessive campaign against a vending machine company, penning letters of complaint that take on an increasingly confessional tone.
At the same time, he commits random acts of destruction -- dismantling household appliances as if trying to pry apart his world.
Amid the ruins, Mitchell strikes up a strange bond with a vending machine company employee (played by Naomi Watts) after she finds herself on the receiving end of his letters.
The film brings director Vallee to Toronto a third year in a row, on the heels of "Wild" with the Oscar-nominated Reese Witherspoon, and "Dallas Buyers Club," which earned Matthew McConaughey an Oscar for his portrayal of a hustler who works around the system to buy medication for AIDS patients.
Comments
Comments are closed.