Demolition

It’s been said that we all grieve in different ways, and you won’t get any argument from Demolition, a wildly uneven drama about one man’s struggle to deal with tragedy.

However, despite another audacious performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, the film seems to exploit the arbitrary nature of the grief process as an excuse for a series of far-fetched contrivances that compromise its emotional impact.

Gyllenhaal plays Davis, a New York investment banker whose wife (Heather Lind) dies in a car crash. Rather than feeling guilt or sorrow, however, he’s left with a stone-faced emptiness. His father-in-law (Chris Cooper), who’s also his boss, is among those who interpret his lack of emotion as callous, especially when Davis is reluctant to become involved with a foundation in his late wife’s memory.

Behind the scenes, Davis’ mourning manifests itself in strange ways, leading to a downward spiral. He opens up in a series of rambling complaint letters to a vending-machine company. He develops a fascination with taking things apart and more violently destroying them. And his life becomes intertwined with a single mother (Naomi Watts) and her troubled teenage son (Judah Lewis) in ways that are borderline inappropriate, yet might be his path to catharsis.

Much of the film’s poignancy comes from Gyllenhaal’s haunting portrayal, which uses facial expressions and body language — from his sunken eyes to his deliberate gait — to reveal more than the dialogue he’s given in the screenplay by Bryan Sipe (The Choice).

Demolition never settles on a consistent tone, too often reaching for awkward laughs when Davis’ emotional trainwreck reaches its various low points. There’s a worthwhile exploration of the grieving process buried within the muddled material, and the abbreviated sequences involving Davis and his father-in-law carry some weight. How should those around him react — with sympathy or disdain?

Meanwhile, director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club) employs some editing trickery that aims to get inside Davis’ head. Those touches are symptomatic of a film that indeed offers a fresh take on familiar material, yet too often its forced quirks feel inauthentic.

What could have been edgy instead strains to be uplifting. By the end, we can see how Davis went through hell and back, but we can’t really feel it.

Rated R, 101 minutes.