Toronto 2015: ‘Demolition’ sets a tone of creative destruction

Modern film is well versed in the man-upended story. Over the years on screen, a life-changing event has caused many to find redemption, and plenty of others to come unglued.

But it’s rare -- even odds-defying -- to encounter someone who seems to be doing both at once.

That’s the character conceit of “Demolition,” a new film that sees Jake Gyllenhaal in some of the same dark comic waters he swam last year as an off-kilter man in “Nightcrawler,” and also has director Jean-Marc Vallee (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “Wild”) once again exploring the power and limits of personal transformation, though this time more wittily and outrageously.

“We’re going to make a lot of noise tonight,” Vallee said as he took the stage before the film’s world premiere at the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday. “It’s probably the most rock ‘n’ roll film I’ve made.”

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Based on a long-beloved Hollywood script from Bryan Sipe, “Demolition” follows uptight Wall Streeter Davis, who is living a cushy but anodyne life when his wife is killed in a car accident. Davis seems numb to the tragic events, and it soon becomes clear why -- he never really loved his wife, and in fact was never really honest about much else either. Soon the gloves come off, and Davis is telling anyone he meets unexpurgated truths as part of a larger bid for authenticity. (He walks up to a construction crew and, to their puzzlement, pays them to let him do manual labor, to name one example.) Basically, he is engaging in the destruction alluded to by the title, figuratively and literally.

Via a whimsical conceit, Davis soon meets single mom Karen (Naomi Watts) and her smart-alecky son Chris (Judah Lewis, in an eye-catching debut) at which point the changes really kick in. Davis, boosted by Gyllenhaal’s gleeful smirk, is letting loose in ways that are both thrilling and selfish as he forms a bond with Chris and generally listens to the (actual) music he’s been shutting out most of his life. There’s some Hal Ashby in there, and some “Falling Down,” though the gun Davis holds is aimed most often at himself (literally, in one showpiece scene).

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That said, all of Davis’ changes of course do not sit well with his former father-in-law Phil (Chris Cooper). Davis’ behavior reads, understandably, as insensitivity to the grieving man, and one of the film’s subtle pleasures is that you never know if you’re supposed to root for Davis or be appalled by him. Modern culture and Oprah tell us to be our best selves, but what if our best self also happens to act like a real jerk?

In an interview, Vallee explained he saw the film as a human road-map of sorts. “Davis made choices because it was easy, and what happens when you have a loss and you ask why you’ve been making that choice? Then you have to do deconstruction and demolition to break that down,” Vallee said of the film, which will be released commercially in April.

Sipe, in an interview last fall during production of the film, said the movie had a metaphoric resonance for him. After years of struggling as a screenwriter, he had lost his desire to keep going. He channeled that into a story of a man at a similar crossroads.

“There was a creative apathy that I was feeling,” he said. “And it became clear to me that before you put things back together you have to tear them apart. So I made that the story of the character.”

Deconstructing reaction at a festival is a fool’s errand, but I was both heartened by those who welcomed the boldness and puzzled by those who avowed skepticism. Though the film ends on a slightly wobbly note, it’s hard not to wonder if some of the naysaying comes from the movie’s subversively anti-materialist bent and how hard that can be for a contemporary audience to digest. When a character in the film takes a hammer to a flat-screen TV, I actually heard two people in my section gasp.

Of course ripping up assumptions is the point of a movie like “Demolition” (and, if you’re feeling slightly more grandiose, a film festival generally). There can be something numbingly familiar about an enterprise like Toronto: another fall, another set of would-be Oscar contenders, another parade of name actors taking on twee roles, even another set of platitudes about filmmaking “courage.” But at its best, what award season and this 10-day festival that embodies it does is make us question what came before, and on Thursday night, Toronto kicked off its festivities by spotlighting some of those very ambitions.

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT