Demolition Review

The central metaphor is so literal that it stops working as one. A man whose feelings have seized up takes apart a refrigerator, a bathroom stall, a computer and eventually an entire house, and the script keeps pausing to explain what the dismantling stands for in case anyone missed it. Gyllenhaal is loose and funny in a way he rarely allows himself, drifting through his father in law's office with a bland smile that only reads as grief in retrospect, and the stretch where he dances down a Manhattan sidewalk under headphones has real lift.

Chris Cooper carries every two hander, holding contempt and pity in the same look. Bryan Sipe's screenplay wants Naomi Watts to be a person and settles for a device, a customer service rep who answers a stranger's letters because someone has to hear them, and her son arrives fully assembled from a different film. Jean-Marc Vallee cuts to music almost continuously, which covered a multitude in Wild and here papers over scenes that never found an ending. The wrecking is enjoyable to watch. What it is supposed to cost the man doing it never registers.